Seagate Technology hopes to super size its revenues with a hard disk drive targeting PC users that offers a whopping 400 GB of storage space and 133 GB on each platter.
Seagate says the Barracuda 7200.8 model is the world’s highest-capacity PC hard drive with the highest data density and the fastest performance and the greatest reliability.
What would anyone need a 400 GB hard drive for? PC-based multi-media applications, like home video editing, movie downloading and TV shows from peer-to-peer networks are driving the demand for more storage capacity.
IDC analyst John Buttress told TechNewsWorld that this is a good move for Seagate for that very reason.
“Seagate’s Barracuda 7200.8 competes well against Hitachi’s offering, and the 133 gigabytes per platter gives them an advantage on component counts other vendors don’t have,” Buttress said.
Native Command Queuing
Seagate’s native SATA interface technology with Native Command Queuing (NCQ) enables the Barracuda 7200.8 to match the performance of 10,000-rpm SATA drives without sacrificing capacity, and at a much more economical cost per gigabyte, according to the company.
Seagate said the Barracuda 7200.8 with NCQ benefits high-performance PC applications such as gaming systems and workstations, PC-based home media servers and entry-level SATA servers.
NCQ is designed to make booting, application loading and file copying faster for everyday mainstream users.
NCQ also provides Hyper-Threading Technology, which allows multiple applications to send I/O requests at the same time. The company said NCQ boosts performance still more when applications take advantage of Asynchronous I/O.
Seagate claims NCQ also increases drive reliability in heavy workloads by eliminating much of the mechanical wear and tear that a non-NCQ drive must endure to transfer the same amount of data.
Are all these claims kosher? Buttress said Seagate’s reputation is solid and the platform is mature.
“Seagate has increased aerial density, and with the SATA version, they have the Native Command Queuing and all those features you want to see in higher-performing drives,” Buttress said.
Quiet Killer
Barracuda 7200.8 provides 8 MB or 16 MB cache sizes, a 7,200-rpm spin speed, and an 8.0-msec average seek time. With Seagate’s patented SoftSonic fluid dynamic bearing motors, the company said Barracuda 7200.8 is extremely quiet.
Seagate’s Barracuda 7200.8 offers capacities of 200GB, 250GB, 300GB and 400 GB, and the option of a native SATA interface or an Ultra ATA interface.
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