Seagate Barracuda 7200.8: 400GBs with NCQ

Final Words

So, is Seagate's new NCQ enabled 400GB monster worth the dollars that consumers will be asked to put up for it? The answer is not as cut and dry as we would want. Many factors come into play when choosing a hard disk drive, such as overall performance and reliability. To have a 400GB drive and have it fail when we need it the most is grounds to pay a little extra for that more reliable unit, especially when working with sensitive data.

Performance can vary greatly among hard drives and, as we have learned over the last few years benchmarking hard disk drives, results are never set in stone. A hard drive can perform extremely well during the first run, but may come close to last in the third or fourth run of a benchmark. There is no single test that can measure the performance of a drive by itself and be accurate enough to use the results thereafter. This is why we have chosen a long list of benchmarks to test each drive - synthetic as well as real world.

As we ran our first benchmark, the synthetic IPEAK pure hard disk performance test, we knew that the 7200.8 would not be the best drive on our list. It did extremely well in Content Creation tests performed with the SYSMark 2004 and WinStone 2004 suites, but could not keep up with the Raptor in Business and Office Productivity tests.

The 7200.8 as well as the 7200.7 did do well in our Real World Game Level Load Time tests with Doom 3 and Half-Life 2, loading Doom 3's caverns1 map in 32.394 seconds with the 7200.7 following closely, and loading Half-Life 2's d1_canals_01 map just inside the 16-second mark, much better than the DiamondMax and SpinPoint drives.

Native Command Queuing was the focus with Seagate's 7200.8 and we ran a few multitasking benchmarks to see how it performs against the others. We first ran the Multitasking Performance test in the Business Winstone 2004 suite and found that Maxtor's DiamondMax 10 NCQ drive came in at first place with an overall multitasking performance rating of 2.95. The Raptor followed, of course, most likely due to its Tagged Command Queuing feature. The Seagate came in at third in multitasking, which doesn't knock it out of the competition, but rather makes it a worthy competitor.

Disk capacity is the biggest attraction to the 7200.8 Barracuda. With only two manufacturers designing drives with capacities of 400GB+ (500GB - Hitachi's 7K500), the questions that should be asked are "How much space do I need and how much am I willing to pay for it?"

Seagate has designed a great drive that has been proven to compete with the 10,000RPM Raptor and Maxtor's newest NCQ enabled drive with a 16MB buffer. Though it doesn't win all of the tests, it does give the other units a run for their money. Seagate also backs their drives with a 5-year warranty, which is the lengthiest in the hard drive industry.

At the time of publication, the Seagate 7200.8 400GB Barracuda retails for around $330. But if you don't mind 100GB less disk space and want a 16MB buffer for that extra punch, the OEM version of Maxtor's DiamondMax 10 or MaXLine III retails for just under $200.


Special thanks to NewEgg.com for providing us with the products for this review.