We reviewed Hitachi's top model in August already. In contrast to the Barracuda 7200.8, it comes with five rather than four platters due to a lower storage density. However, the DeskStar still comes out on top compared to Seagate's device.

Speed Or Capacity: Can't We Have Our Cake And Eat It Too?

We already mentioned the performance shortcomings of the Barracuda 7200.9. While the Barracuda 7200.8 scored 13.8 ms and offered a read transfer rate of up to 68 MB/s, the dot nine reaches 14.1 ms and a mere 61 MB/s - which approaches a 10% decrease in transfer rate. The average read transfer rates even went down by 12%.

PCMark05's hard drive benchmark confirms this with a Windows XP startup transfer rates of 7.8 versus 8.2 MB/s. The file writing benchmark even went down to 57.2 MB/s, while the 'Cuda' 7200.8 scored 66.5 MB/s.

With these results, the Barracuda 7200.9 cannot beat Hitachi's latest DeskStar 7K500 top model, which is built by combining as many as five storage platters. While we would generally tend to purchase drives with as little moving components as possible, the 7K500 definitely is the faster choice, beating the 7200.8 in almost every benchmark.

• Deskstar 7K500 500GB...
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  • $150.00
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  • $175.00