Introduction

The 7200.7 line brought us drives with capacities between 40GB to 200GB in PATA version as well as the native SATA (as opposed to bridged SATA solutions) versions with 1.5Gb/sec transfer rates and optional Native Command Queuing, and as you can guess from the name, 7200RPM spindle speeds throughout the entire line. After the 7200.7 series, Seagate decided to split the 7200.x family into two separate lines when introducing the 7200.8 series. The new model carried capacities in the 250GB to 400GB range, again, with both PATA and SATA interfaces, so the 7200.8 was a continuation to higher capacities.


Click to enlarge.

Today, Seagate officially announces the joining of the 7200.7 and 7200.8 drives with its 7200.9 line of hard disk drives. The new line ranges from 40GB to 500GB and has models with 2MB, 8MB, or a whopping 16MB buffer. The release of the 7200.9 product line announces the 9th generation of Seagate's 7200RPM desktop hard drives and they conform to the latest in SATA standards ("SATA 2.5"), including the 3Gb/sec transfer rates.

The 7200.9 line of hard disk drives brings an end to the separation of powers and is aimed at mid to high end desktop and gaming PCs, media PCs, and low end servers. This classification gives us a bit of insight at the pricing of these new drives, but we will look into the costs of Seagate's new line of mid-performance hard drives a bit later. Right now, we'd like to cover some information that we received during a technical briefing with Seagate's 7200.9 product marketing manager.

The 7200.9 Series
Comments Locked

72 Comments

View All Comments

  • ATWindsor - Monday, October 10, 2005 - link

    The best would be if they reported sound power, as sound pressure depends the enviroment, and the power is constand for a given sound source (and you can calculte the pressure at a given distance in a given room). But it's almost the pressure who is given in computer-components. And the ear "hears pressure" so for the hearing its more useful to talk about the pressure.
  • jkostans - Monday, October 10, 2005 - link

    What do HD manufacturers call 1,000,000,000 bytes a GB?
  • ATWindsor - Monday, October 10, 2005 - link

    Because the SI-system (which is centuries old), clearly defines Giga as 1 000 000 000. The fact that some software doesn't follow the standard can't be blaimed on the HD-manufactureres.
  • rendezvous - Monday, October 10, 2005 - link

    Because the SI-system (which is centuries old)

    Centuries as in from 1960?

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SI">Le Système International d'Unités @ Wikipedia
  • ATWindsor - Tuesday, October 11, 2005 - link

    The modern version of the metric system is from the 1060s, so i guess i was abit unclear, however, the metric system itself, which the SI-system is built upon is fomr the 18th century.

  • JarredWalton - Monday, October 10, 2005 - link

    Basically, the problem is that KB, MB, and later GB, TB, etc. all came from ealy computing days, where 2^10 was close enough to 1000 that they abbreviated it to KB. Later on, SI came into being and really got pissy about the use of "Kilo" for "1024" rather than "1000". The hard drive manufacturers are of course using the multiples of 1000 because it makes their product look better. Why say 93.13 GB when you can say 100 GB?

    SI later proposed the "kibi, mibi, gibi, etc." prefixes to get around the discrepancy. In reality, few companies are using these terms at present. That may change in the future, but in truth most people don't care. We mention this discrepancy more so that people are aware of why the difference is there than to place blame.
  • jkostans - Monday, October 10, 2005 - link

    So you're saying windows reports "gibibytes" not gigabytes?
  • ATWindsor - Monday, October 10, 2005 - link

    Correct
  • geoff2k - Monday, October 10, 2005 - link

    So they can make smaller drives?

    Well, that and:

    http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html">http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html
  • Zar0n - Monday, October 10, 2005 - link

    I have one 7200.7 SATA, so far no problems but seek noise is loud, I was waiting for 7800.9 to get one 500GB drive.

    Please make some acoustic tests when u review 7800.9.
    Also with NCQ ON/Off, the 7200.7 sometimes was slower with NCQ ON.
    Bench with Maxtor, WD, Hitachi and Samsung drives would be nice.

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now