Seagate claims to have broken the record for the most storage on a single disc platter, managing to store 133GB per disc in its newly released 400GB hard drive.

The Barracuda 7200.8 has begun shipping to retailers, resellers and system builders and should be appearing in commercial PCs shortly.

According to Seagate, the drive's design uses fewer disks and head readers to ensure better reliability and faster data access.

Dave Reinsel, director of storage research at analyst IDC, said in a statement that the drive had "industry leading" areal density.

The 7200.8 has also been optimised to work with hyper-threading technology used by Intel in its top of the line processors to boost performance by allowing multiple data requests simultaneously.

The drive can handle 8MB or 16MB caches and spins at 7,200 rpm. It is available with Serial ATA or Ultra ATA interfaces and has a five year warranty. 200GB, 250GB and 300GB versions are also available.