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PC World: Seagate builds the smarter hard drive

Iniciado por Invitado_Anonymous_* , Jun 13 2004 05:25 PM

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#1 Invitado_Anonymous_*

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Escrito 13 June 2004 - 05:25 PM

[align=center:729eb1a12a]This Hard Drive Belongs in Mensa

Seagate proves you don't need to spin faster--just smarter--to get better performance.

PC performance buffs have long measured hardware advances using a few simple metrics: Is it faster? Is it bigger? Does it have more blinky lights?

Okay, that last one may just be my personal metric. But the point is that technology has always been more complicated than that. Processors, graphics cards, memory--each one is more than just the sum of its speeds and feeds. And now there's a new technology that promises to make a hard drive's performance more than just a reflection of how fast it spins.

At Microsoft's Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (known as WinHEC) in early May Seagate demonstrated its newest serial ATA hard drive, which begins shipping to retailers in a few weeks. What's interesting about the new Barracuda 7200.7 isn't its spin speed, which is a standard 7200 rotations per minute. It's not the capacity, either--a fairly pedestrian 160GB. What's exceptional about this drive is that it includes a new technology called Native Command Queuing that effectively makes the drive smarter, allowing it to perform on par with notably pricier drives that spin much faster.

In its demo, Seagate showed its $150 Barracuda 7200.7 and Western Digital's $250 Raptor WD740GD (a 74GB, 10,000-rotations-per-minute drive) running an Intel I/O benchmark called IOMeter that measured the amount of time it took each drive to transfer a 4GB file. Seagate's 7200-rpm drive with NCQ won, proving brains can win over speed. (At PC World we haven't conducted our own tests yet, but I'm hoping we can benchmark the technology within the next few weeks.)

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