Seagate Technology has started shipping a 400Gbyte hard
drive targeted at personal computers.
The increasing popularity of PC-based multimedia applications,
particularly home video editing and downloading of films and TV
shows from peer-to-peer networks, is driving demand for bigger
hard-disc drives. In addition to high storage capacities, such
drives need to be able to read and write data fast enough to keep
up with real-time video.
The drive is the fourth member of Seagate's Barracuda 7200.8
series and comes in two versions, one with an Ultra ATA/100
interface and one with a Serial ATA. The rotational speed of the
disc is 7,200rpm, with an average seek time of 8 milliseconds.
The Serial ATA version supports native command queuing (NCQ),
allowing the drive to manage multiple commands from the PC in
whatever order it deems most efficient. Until now, drives have
handled read and write requests in the order it gets them. Native
command queuing means users with NCQ-compliant systems will see
performance closer to 10,000rpm than 7,200rpm, according to
Seagate.
The disc has three media platters, each capable of storing
133Gbytes of data, which Seagate said was a record for a
PC-targeted drive.
Martyn Williams writes for IDG News Service