Seagate Technology LLC said yesterday that it has started shipping a hard disk drive, targeted at PCs, that offers 400GB of storage space.
As more and more people use PCs for multimedia applications, particularly editing of home videos and downloading of movies and TV shows from peer-to-peer networks, demand for larger capacity hard disk drives is growing. In addition to offering high storage capacities, such drives need to be able to read and write data to the drive fast enough to keep up with real-time video.
The drive is the fourth member of Seagate's Barracuda 7200.8 series and is available in two versions, one with an Ultra ATA/100 interface and one with a Serial ATA interface. The rotational speed of the disc is 7,200 rpm, with an average seek time of 8 milliseconds.
The Serial ATA version supports a technology called Native Command Queuing (NCQ), which allows the drive to manage multiple commands from the PC in whatever order it deems most efficient. Until now, drives handled read and write requests in the order they were received. With NCQ technology, users of the Serial ATA version of the Barracuda drive with systems that support NCQ will see performance closer to that of a 10,000-rpm drive than that of a 7,200-rpm device, according to Seagate.
