The Drive that Does Not Run Out of Space

Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 400GB Investigated

by Yaroslav Lyssenko

[ 04/30/2005 | 09:05 PM ]

Although it seems that on the one hand hard disk drive makers just cannot manufacture larger and larger HDDs in cost-effective manner and on the other hand consumers hardly need anything beyond 80GB, manufactures try to find new ways to increase performance and attractiveness of their products. A couple of web-sites have reviewed Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 400GB hard disk drive, which is based on the 7200.7 line with the Native Command Queuing (NCQ) feature which is aimed to boost the performance of the hard drives. The unit utilizes a three 133GB platter design, is enhanced with 8MB cache and spins at 7200RPM.

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“Native Command Queuing was the focus with Seagate’s 7200.8 and we ran a few multitasking benchmarks to see how it performs against the others. We first ran the Multitasking Performance test in the Business Winstone 2004 suite and found that Maxtor’s DiamondMax 10 NCQ drive came in at first place with an overall multitasking performance rating of 2.95. The Raptor followed, of course, most likely due to its Tagged Command Queuing feature. The Seagate came in at third in multitasking, which doesn’t knock it out of the competition, but rather makes it a worthy competitor. Seagate has designed a great drive that has been proven to compete with the 10,000RPM Raptor and Maxtor’s newest NCQ enabled drive with a 16MB buffer. Though it doesn’t win all of the tests, it does give the other units a run for their money. Seagate also backs their drives with a 5-year warranty, which is the lengthiest in the hard drive industry,” concludes AnandTech.

“We’ve seen a slew of tests with these drives, some predictable, some not.  It was surprising to see that when Native Command Queuing was enabled on the Seagate hard drive that it actually had a small negative impact on performance.  However, NCQ seemed to shine some light on the game loading tests, maybe a dim light, but a light nevertheless.  It’s not that huge of a deal saving around a second of loading time when it comes to game,” writes Techware Labs.

• AnandTech: Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 400GBs with NCQ.
• Techware Labs: Hitachi Deskstar 7K400 vs Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 400 GB.