Leapfrogging the hard drive industry in storage density, Seagate today introduced the world’s first hard drive to store 100GB of data on a single 3.5” platter. With an advanced head and media technology, the new addition to the Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 family achieves a 200GB capacity using only two platters, and offers the choice of a Parallel ATA or native Serial ATA-150 interface.

The new Barracuda 7200.7 200GB models are offered with an 8MB cache and a three-year warranty as standard features. Seagate’s popular Barracuda 7200.7 hard drives also come in capacities of 160, 120, 80 and 40GB. Barracuda 7200.7 HDDs resist up to 350Gs of non-operating shock and are among the quietest hard drives in their class, emitting less than 2.5bels at idle and excellent performance.

Seagate claims that its Barracuda 7200.7 is the industry’s first hard drive family capable of supporting SATA Native Command Queuing (NCQ). NCQ will be implemented on production Barracuda 7200.7 Serial ATA-150 HDDs when system architectures that support NCQ become more broadly available. NCQ technology enables the hard drive to intelligently reorder and optimize both read and write command execution, improving the performance of queued workloads by minimizing mechanical positioning latencies on the drive.

Seagate demonstrated SATA NCQ technology on its new 200GB Barracuda 7200.7 SATA hard drive today at the Intel Developer Forum in San Jose, California.

The 200GB Barracuda 7200.7 with a Parallel ATA interface will ship next month through distributors. Shipments of the 200GB Serial ATA-150 version are scheduled to begin in November.