Round-Up: Comparison Testing of 22 Hard Disk Drives

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Seagate Barracuda ATA 7200.8: Two Faces To Show

The introduction of the Seagate 7200.8 family was accompanied by a bump in data density from 100 GB to more than 130 GB per platter. With two-sided, dual-platter configurations, that means Seagate can accommodate up to 400 GB in one of these drives. They also offer high maximum and average data transfer rates, but at some cost to disk access times. At 13-15 ms, the Barracuda 7200.8 isn't the best choice for access-time-sensitive applications, though this kind of use seldom occurs in desktop machines. One undeniable plus is this drive's 5-year warranty, which is better than that of most other vendors.

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.