New, Faster, Quieter: The Seagate Barracuda 7200.8

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Seagate External Hard Drive 400 GB

We recently tested Seagate's 200 GB version of this unit. The internal disk was obviously upgraded for this new device, but otherwise not much else changed - as before, the overall performance remains limited by the USB 2.0/FireWire interface. With USB 2.0, the maximum transfer rate is just 23 MB/s. Performance is somewhat better with FireWire though, as access times are almost the same as those of the installed drive. Still, the FireWire and USB protocols obviously limit overall performance compared to the internal versions of this drive family.

Patrick Schmid
Patrick Schmid
Editor-in-Chief (2005-2006)

Patrick Schmid was the editor-in-chief for Tom's Hardware from 2005 to 2006. He wrote numerous articles on a wide range of hardware topics, including storage, CPUs, and system builds.