Seagate launches 500GB Serial ATA II HDDs

Seagate announced the availability of its Barracuda 7200.9 family of internal hard drives to the worldwide distribution channel. Targeted at low-cost and Serial ATA servers, mainstream and high-performance PCs, PC gaming systems and media PCs, the new Barracuda 7200.9 family combines up to a massive half- terabyte capacity with fast 3Gbit/second Serial ATA throughput and leading- edge storage technologies such as Native Command Queuing (NCQ) to deliver the industry's highest levels of performance and reliability.

Seagate's Barracuda 7200.9 3Gbit/second SATA disc drive family delivers the high capacity, performance and reliability and great value that system builders need for single-user systems such as media, gaming, high-end workstations and consumer PCs. Barracuda 7200.9 also meets the high throughput and low cost-per-gigabyte requirements of builders of multi-user systems such as low-cost and SATA servers for small offices. To simplify integration, Barracuda 7200.9 automatically configures the drive to either new 3Gbit/second or legacy 1.5Gbit/second SATA systems.

Barracuda 7200.9 delivers the industry's highest data density, storing up to 160GB on a single disc. Seagate's leading areal density results in fewer discs and heads and ensures the fastest performance and greatest reliability of any PC hard drive in its class.

Seagate's 3Gbit/second SATA interface with NCQ supports Intel Hyper- Threading to increase the performance of SATA servers and workstations supporting intensive applications such as financial, engineering or digital media manipulation. NCQ also increases reliability in heavy workloads by significantly reducing the drive's mechanical wear.

Seagate NCQ provides a number of advanced capabilities such as command reordering, first-party DMA, interrupt aggregation and race-free status return for multi-user system builders needing enhanced system-level performance for applications with transactional workloads. With Barracuda 7200.9, Seagate is the only hard drive maker to offer 3Gbit/second SATA with NCQ across all capacities, from 80GB to half terabyte.

Barracuda 7200.9 drives also improve system data and hardware reliability through enhanced CRC data protection, the latest latching cables and snap-in connectors, and thin cables for improved cooling. All the drives are backed by Seagate's industry-leading 5-year warranty.

At 3Gbit/second, the Barracuda 7200.9 internal disc drives double the throughput of first-generation SATA drives. The world's only ninth-generation family of 7200-RPM disc drives for desktop PCs also delivers up to 16 Mbytes of cache for high performance and the quietest operation in a PC hard drive. All Barracuda 7200.9 SATA drives adhere to the latest Serial ATA 2.5 specification. Serial ATA 2.5 integrates Serial ATA 1.0, all the optional advanced specifications and years of errata into a single document.