Seagate Barracuda 7200.8

Note: Since the publication of this review, this drive has been retested under Testbed4, a newer hardware/software/benchmark platform. Please see this article for updated results. This review remains for reference purposes only.

Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 Capacities Model Number Capacity ST3200826AS 200 GB ST3250823AS 250 GB ST3300831AS 300 GB ST3400832AS 400 GB Lowest Real-Time Price: Introduction When it came to moving product to a 100 GB/platter paradigm, competitors Maxtor and Seagate both announced and seemed to deliver (at least to the retail channel) the MaXLine III and the revised Barracuda 7200.7 at about the same time. Seagate, however, remains the industry's largest independent drive manufacturer and continues to pour large amounts of funds into research and development. It shows- the firm remains the sole manufacturer to ship 133 GB/platter product.

The Barracuda 7200.8 family actually straddles the divide between the newer 133 GB platters and the industry-standard capacity of 100 GB/disk. The flagship 400 GB unit incorporates just three platters to achieve its monstrous capacity. The 250 GB drive also uses the denser disk with two platters (the remaining 16 GB electronically "ignored" to achieve a more marketable standard capacity).

The 300 GB and 200 GB products, however, use the 100 GB platters that first debuted in later-model 7200.7 drives. The result, like the complete 7200.7 line, is a slightly schizophrenic break in a drive family that used to be the most dependable in the industry when it came to determining density and "generation."

As its designation implies, the Barracuda 7200.8 incorporates the 7200 RPM spindle speed associated with the brand since its introduction over 13 years ago. With this newest 'Cuda, Seagate claims a relatively ambitious seek time of just 8.0 milliseconds. A standard eight-megabyte buffer rounds out the offering.

The drive is available in all capacities (200 GB, 250, GB, 300 GB, 400 GB) with an SATA interface and available in three of the four (omitting the 200 GB point) with a legacy PATA connection. The former feature SATA-2 style Native Command Queuing (NCQ), a technique that aims to improve performance through the reordering of outstanding requests for efficient retrieval. Seagate currently boasts the best ATA drive warranties around... the Barracuda 7200.8 enjoys a five-year warranty.

Available only in larger capacities, the Barracuda 7200.8 co-exists with the 7200.7. The drive's predecessor remains to fill the still considerable demand for sub 200 GB drives. The 7200.8, on the other hand, targets applications that require high-capacity at low-cost: video editing on the cheap, digital video recorders, light duty file/web servers, etc. In the following tests, the 400 GB Barracuda 7200.8 with an SATA interface is compared against the following drives for the subsequent reasons:

Hitachi Deskstar 7K400 (400 GB)	Previous-generation competing unit
Maxtor MaXLine III (300 GB)	Current-generation competing unit
Samsung SpinPoint P80 (160 GB)	Previous-generation competing unit
Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 (200 GB)	Manufacturer's previous-generation unit
Western Digital Caviar WD2500JD (250 GB)	Previous-generation competing unit