Seagate Technology LLC has upped the ante in the hard drive war by shipping a super-sized version that can store 400 gigabytes (GB) of data.
Seagate claims the drive, the Barracuda 7200.8, which also offers a fast serial-ATA (SATA) connection, is the worldis highest-capacity PC drive. The drive is the fourth member of Seagateis Barracuda 7200.8 series of drives and is also available with a Ultra ATA/100 interface.
In addition, Seagate has increased the data density of each internal plate to 133GB, allowing Seagate to use fewer plates and reduce the overall size of the drive.
The company says the driveis SATA connection and its NCQ technology allows the Barracuda, which spins at 7,200 revolutions per minute (RPM), to match the performance of 10,000-rpm SATA drives without sacrificing capacity. The drive comes with an 8 megabyte or 16MB cache and has an average seek time 8.0 milliseconds.
NCQ is designed to make the drive work with Hyper-Threading Technology processors, thereby allowing several applications to send requests to access data simultaneously. The new technique will increase reliability by eliminating mechanical wear that a non-NCQ drive must endure.
Seagateis Barracuda 7200.8 comes in 200GB, 250GB, 300GB and 400GB capacities. Pricing was not announced.