Seagate's Barracuda 7200.9 hard drives
@ 2005/12/14IN THE HARD DRIVE WORLD, capacity is king. Capacity actually comes in two flavors. The first and most obvious is the storage capacity of a hard drive. The second, and potentially more important, is the capacity of individual platters within a drive. This platter capacity is known as the areal density, and it can do more than just increase the amount of data a drive can hold. Higher areal densities allow drives to offer more storage capacity with fewer platters, potentially lowering noise levels, cutting power consumption, and reducing the risk of a catastrophic head crash. As if that weren't enough, higher areal densities can also improve performance by allowing the drive head to access the same amount of data over a shorter physical distance.
Seagate's new Barracuda 7200.9 family of Serial ATA hard drives packs storage capacity on both fronts, with one model weighing in at a hefty half-terabyte and another packing a single 160GB platter whose areal density is 25% higher than its closest competitor. We've rounded up both models and run them through a brutal gauntlet of storage tests against earlier Barracudas and drives from Hitachi, Maxtor, and Western Digital. Read on to see how the 7200.9s compare.
Seagate's new Barracuda 7200.9 family of Serial ATA hard drives packs storage capacity on both fronts, with one model weighing in at a hefty half-terabyte and another packing a single 160GB platter whose areal density is 25% higher than its closest competitor. We've rounded up both models and run them through a brutal gauntlet of storage tests against earlier Barracudas and drives from Hitachi, Maxtor, and Western Digital. Read on to see how the 7200.9s compare.