The Barracuda ATA family was the first desktop PC product family to run at 7200 RPM. This seventh generation offering delivers capacities of up to 200 GB, using only two platters of 100 GB to do the job. Clearly, Seagate has both technology and experience advantages in its favor to help it offer quiet, capable disk drives to customers.

Seagate's model designations can be somewhat difficult to decode, partly because the 7200.7 product family includes versions both with and without command queuing support. These details are all spelled out in Seagate's "Barracuda 7200 Model Details" table online.

With an access time of 12.8 ms, the 7200.7 family's performance is better than that of the successor 7200.8 family, but maximum transfer rates increase from 58 to nearly 70 MB/s for the .8 versions.