Developed and produced by Seagate in response to competitive pressure and consumer demand for larger and faster drives, this drive is shaping up to be one of the largest, most powerful, full-featured consumer hard drives so far.
Specifications:
The only other company with a competitively-sized drive is Hitachi, with their newly-released 7k400. This drive also runs at 7200rpm, but has only 8MB of cache, a three year warranty, and supports Tagged Command Queuing as opposed to the more efficient NCQ. The 7k400 is also a derivative of their previous generation of 7k250s - the only difference between the two being an increase in the number of platters per drive: from three to five. This increases latency, power consumption, failure rates, and the amount of sound produced. Seagate is known throughout the industry for consistently producing some of the fastest, quietest, most reliable drives on the market.
Along with this drive, Seagate is also releasing notebook drives, the Momentus 7200.1 and 5400.2, at 7200 and 5400rpm respectively. Both are equipped with up to 100GB of capacity. These drives will feature 2 or 8MB of cache for the lower-end and mainstream specie and 8MB of cache for the more performance-oriented versions.
In the enterprise sector, Seagate is releasing a 147GB 15,000rpm drive. The Cheetah 15k.4 is one of the largest of its kind (the only other 147GB 15k drive is from Maxtor - the Atlas 15k II), and Seagate modestly asserts that it is the highest performing drive ever. Time will test the validity of this claim, but you can safely bet that your 75GXPs won’t stand a chance against these SCSI monsters.
The Barracuda 7200.8 should be on store shelves and Newegg's pages by September, 2004.
Sources:
http://www.seagate.com/cda/newsinfo/newsroom/releases/article/0,1121,2170,00.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20040617/index.html
http://www.hitachigst.com/
http://www.maxtor.com
Update: Maxtor has just released a 16mb cache hard drive: the Maxtor Diamondmax 10