Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 250GB SATA

Seagate's Barracuda 7200.8 Serial ATA drives may not be the fastest drive available on the market, but the cool and quiet operation and superb warranty make it more than worthy of consideration.

8/16/05 – Seagate has made a major statement in the hard drive industry by reversing the trend on warranties. They were the first company to extend the warranty on their drives and now offer a full five year warranty. This means that Seagate is committed to quality in their drives.

Seagate was the first company to incorporate native Serial ATA onto their consumer hard drives. While many companies were using bridge chips, Seagate was actively developing a single chip Serial ATA interface. They were also one of the first to implement Native Command Queuing support into their drives for improved multiple command requests.

During the testing of the Barracuda 7200.8 drive, the performance was good but below that of other drives on the market for single tasks read and writes. It is still more than acceptable for the majority of tasks that users will have for it. The real area where the Barracuda 7200.8 shines is with multitasking. With systems that support the Native Command Queuing, performance can be greatly enhanced when multiple applications are access the drive.

Desktop hard drives recently have started to cause problems with heat and noise within computers. The faster rotational speeds and need to get as much storage media into the drive casing as possible has increased both the noise and heat that drives generate. Thankfully, the Seagate engineers have developed the 7200.8 to run much cooler and quieter than competing drives.