Seagate Barracuda 7200.9

Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 Available Capacities Model Number Capacity ST3808110AS 80 GB ST3120813AS 120 GB ST3160812AS 160 GB ST3200827AS 200 GB ST3250824AS 250 GB ST3300622AS 300 GB ST3400633AS 400 GB ST3500641AS 500 GB Lowest Real-Time Price (500 GB):

Introduction

Seagate's Barracuda ATA family has won a loyal following over the years. Some of the drive's earlier generations, however, left a few diehard fans jaded. At that time, the Barracuda brand remained associated with a workhorse SCSI design, and many a prospective upgrader was left disappointed that the family did not maintain the "SCSI drive in ATA clothing" design that defined the line's launch. Time passed, however, and Seagate eventually brought many of its market-leading technology advantages to the line.

The Barracuda ATA IV, for example, was the first drive (excluding the quirky 7200 RPM Medalist Pro of yesteryear) to bring modern fluid dynamic bearing motors to the table. Its successor, the Barracuda ATA V, was the first unit to ship with a SATA (and a native, non-bridged design at that!) interface. Interestingly, somewhere in the shuffle, the "Barracuda 6" was lost. A revised version of the 7200.7, however, brought SATA's long-awaited Native Command Queuing (NCQ) into the picture.

That said, what new features does the Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 bring to the arena? Most prominent is Barracuda's return to a four-platter assembly, a number not associated with the family since 1999's original drive. The upped count permits Seagate to be among the first manufacturers to hit the half-terabyte storage mark. Unfortunately, however, the travails of density continue to become apparent... per platter, the flagship 7200.9 actually stores less (125 GB) than the 7200.8 (133 GB). Smaller 7200.9s sport platters that cram up to 160 on their surfaces; implementing these disks with larger associated head counts, however, remains a problem.

The high-end (300+ GB) 7200.9s match the larger, 16-megabyte buffer found on today's contemporary SATA drives. Most of the smaller versions come standard with 8, while a handful of relatively tiny PATA drives incorporate 2 megabytes. Seagate specs the 7200.9's average seek time at a rather high 11 milliseconds. The 7200.9 is also among the first drives to ship featuring the 300 MB/sec SATA II interface.

Seagate targets the Barracuda 7200.9 almost exclusively at the desktop market where lighter loads and 8 hours-a-day, 5 days-a-week power-on cycles are the norm. Though a desktop unit, the 7200.9 nonetheless enjoys the best warranty around... 5 years of protection.

As a contemporary 7200 RPM drive, the Barracuda 7200.9 will be compared against these drives in the tests that follow: