Introduction

Seagate has been in the hard disk drive business for a long time and they know how to make a solid hard drive for any particular market. So much so that they claim they are the world's largest manufacturer of disc drives.

Recently the company launched their range of new 7200 rpm Barracuda drives with native SATA interface. The new drives with model number 7200.8 starts at 80GB and go all the way up to 400GB with 120GB, 160GB, 200GB and 300GB models in the middle which provides good market choice. 400GB of storage or almost four hundred and twenty million bytes is enough space to store around 6,400 hours of music or 100,000 high resolution images. Some may argue 400GB is over the top but there is certainly a demand for this amount of storage for enthusiasts or heavy Internet users. And it's not stopping here, as in 2008, Seagate predict the standard PC hard drive will be 1TB or 1000GB.

The eighth generate of Barracuda drives from Seagate are said to be among the quietest and best performing consumer level drives on the market. Based on similar technology to the seven series, the new series has had its internals tweaked for blazing fast performance, according to Seagate, with such inclusions as NCQ (Native Command Queuing with 8MB cache and 16MB cache version coming along soon.

Usually new hard drives don't spark much interest but when Seagate claim they have a monster performing drive in their hands, we just had to grab one from them and compare against one of the best performing consumer SATA level drives on the market - the 10,000 rpm Raptor from Western Digital as well as the older generation Barracuda (7200.7) to see what has changed. So after taking a quick look at the drive, we'll compare this new drive from Seagate to the competition and see just how it stands up.

In the wild you wouldn't expect a Raptor to be scared of a Barracuda but the food chain just might have made a bit of a change in favour of the big mean tropical fish. Let's take a closer look.

Find the lowest price on Seagate Serial ATA Hard Disk Drives!