We may well never know the true meaning behind why hard drive manufacturers have chosen to go with naming their drives after fish and their slimy spawn. That said, a Barracuda is probably a good call for this beast, considering its ability to eat almost anything thrown at it.
Packing a whopping 400GB (or 376GB – see the intro to the Hardcore section. Now. No, really.), this is nevertheless a sneeze from being full. Jam-packed with readme.txt fi les or ‘575 exciting games’ as the press release elegantly states. This drive consists of three platters storing 133GB each. Yes, that’s 399GB. Someone get the broom.
Seagate was only too keen to demonstrate to us its innate ability to stack six of these bastards in a RAID 5 confi guration (on some SATA RAID PCI controller) for two whole terabytes. Admittedly, this was somewhat arousing.
The standard cache size is the usual 8MB, however there is also a 16MB cache edition, though the performance benefi ts aren’t immediately obvious for most general tasks.
As with all Seagate drives, it has Native Command Queuing support with a 32-command depth, lengthening the life of the drive and accessing the data quicker and quieter. Slapping her on the test bed, SiSoft Sandra 2005 showed she can whip up a respectable drive index of 59MB/s.
It’s about 25 percent more per GB than other drives we’ve looked at, but considering its quiet level of operation (~25 acoustic decibels) and high performance, some things are worth paying that little bit extra for. If you dig wads of data, this is for you.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012