Seagate Technology, a storage company that is somewhat behind competitors in terms of large hard disk drives, recently started to sell its 200GB HDD that has been announced, but that is not currently listed in the company’s directory of products.

Announced back in mid-September 2003, the new Barracuda 7200.7 200GB models are offered with an 8MB cache and a three-year warranty. The 200GB device utilizes a couple of 100GB platters that are also the base of certain Seagate’s 160, 120, 80 and 40GB Barracuda 7200.7 models. Despite of the original claim, the 200GB HDD from Seagate Technology did no show up in November, but only emerges in the very late December in Japan with likely appearance in early 2004 in the USA and the EU.

Seagate’s new 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. Average seek time of the novelties is 8.5ms, while the maximum internal transfer rate is approximately 85.4MB/s (683Mb/s), according to this Japanese web-site.

Seagate initially claimed that its Barracuda 7200.7 was the industry’s first hard drive family capable of supporting SATA Native Command Queuing (NCQ). NCQ was projected to 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 Serial ATA-150 NCQ technology on its new 200GB Barracuda 7200.7 SATA hard drive today at the Intel Developer Forum in San Jose, California.

At this point 200GB HDDs are only available in Parallel ATA-100 versions and retailers do not offer Serial ATA-150 models with 200GB capacity.

Parallel ATA-100 200GB hard disk drives from Seagate Technology are quoted between $170 and $210 in Japan.