[Eugene]

Seagate's new Barracuda 7200.9 essentially rolls the older 7200.8 and 7200.7 lines into one all-encompassing family that delivers a wide range of capacities available in both the PATA and SATA interfaces. Bumping its design to four platters, Seagate has delivered 500 of capacity. StorageReview puts the firm's highly-anticipated flagship unit to the test and stacks it up agains the competition.

Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 Review

[wattly]

Cool review, though I think you got the date wrong on the main page

[Eugene]

What, we didn't turn the clocks forward one day yesterday?

Seriously, the review was scheduled for tomorrow but we needed to compress the editorial schedule a bit because we're so backlogged...

[wattly]

Makes sense, it just threw me off for a few minutes (I was still dealing with the DST time change).

[whiic]

160GB version of 7200.9 is something I'd like to see reviewed. 160GB/platter is a huge leap forward in data density. While it doesn't necessarily make the drive fast in real world (as 160GB version is equipped with 2MB and 8MB caches), that's 160GB on one platter => potentially less noise and less heat compared to any other drive currently available with the same capacity. But only potentially: Seagate drives have not been the most economic in terms of "watts/platter". To compare one platter Seagate to two platter competitors requires (at least) reviewing the Seagate... that's because Seagate don't publish detailed datasheets with different current draw and noise specs for each platter configuration (while some other manufacturers do). All 7200.7 Seagates from 40GB to 300GB have the same power draw (7.2W) and the same acoustic noise (idle 2.5 bels) according to their datasheet.

Reviewing only flagships don't necessarily find the fastest drives amongst a generation of HDD from manufacturer X as it seems to became a trend that flagships have lower data densities. For example, who knows whether T7K250 is faster than 7K500 if no-one bothers to make a decent review of them both.

[sechs]

whiic, on Oct 30 2005, 03:41 PM, said:

Reviewing only flagships don't necessarily find the fastest drives amongst a generation of HDD from manufacturer X as it seems to became a trend that flagships have lower data densities. For example, who knows whether T7K250 is faster than 7K500 if no-one bothers to make a decent review of them both.

I agree.

Since Seagate has decided to take a page from Western Digital's book and give drives with different specifications the same family name, it would be useful to know how different models fare.

[FaaR]

While I understand you may have little or no control over exactly which ads are displayed on the site Eugene, I still wanted to inform you that on the conclusions page there was a Google ad for therightspamsolution.com (and for heavens sake don't anybody go there now so they get referrals from storagereview in their server logs!)

I wonder what keyword triggered a spam site being advertised here. Sort of having men's magazines on a girlscout website IMO.

Anyway, thanx for the review, GOOD to see this site starting to live again! And when do we see Hitachi's newest drives reviewed, the K7400 is kind of old isn't it?

[Olaf van der Spek]

Would it be possible to include numbers in the IOmeter graphs (like a normal table below the grap as AnandTech sometimes does)?
I'm having some trouble finding out which line is which drive.

[continuum]

Nice... gaming performance looks good.

Yes, a 7200.9 with 160GB/platter review would be very interesting.

[steve8]

how about 7800.9 160GB unit which uses a single 160GB platter. ? how does the performance/ noise/power etc compare?
i wouldnt be surprised if the unit was sizably better in performance and noise.


anyway how about the T7k250?... the choice of competition seems odd.