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| Seagate 500GB Barracuda 7200.9 Serial ATA Hard Drive |
|
The Barracuda 7200.9 is the first Seagate desktop drive to support the new SATA 3Gb/s transfer protocol. Needless to say, it also supports NCQ (Native Command Queuing) for better performance. Of course, your motherboard should support both SATA 3Gb/s and NCQ to derive maximum performance from the drive. It also comes with twice as much buffer memory as the Barracuda 7200.8 hard drive. Of course, that's only available for drive capacities of 300GB, 400GB and 500GB. Unfortunately, as we saw in our benchmarks, the large 16MB buffer did little to help its performance. It was actually slower than its older brother - the Barracuda 7200.8. Even so, one must admit that this hard drive certainly has its capacity to make up for the lacklustre performance. The humongous capacity of 500GB cannot be denied. If you need a very large hard drive, you should take a look at this new hard drive. You will also be glad to know that it comes with a magnificent 5-year limited warranty. While this does not guarantee that this hard drive won't quit on you in the next five years, it does show the amount of confidence Seagate has in the reliability of this model. For more details, read our Comprehensive Review! |
| MSRP |
• NA |
| Lowest PriceGrabber Price |
|
| Review |
|
| Model |
• ST3500641AS |
| Formatted Capacity |
• 500 GB |
| Guaranteed Sectors |
• 976,773,168 |
Bytes Per Sector |
• 512 bytes |
Sectors Per Track |
• 63 |
| Cylinders |
• 16,383 |
| Read/Write Heads |
• 16 |
| Recording Method |
• 16/17 EPRML |
| Interleave |
• 1 : 1 |
| Spindle Speed |
• 7,200 RPM |
| Cache Buffer |
• 16 MB SDRAM |
| Average Latency |
• 4.16 msec. |
Maximum Internal Data Transfer Rate |
• 100 MB/s |
| Maximum I/O Transfer Rate |
• 300 MB/s |
| Average Seek |
• 11.0 msec. |
| Average Latency |
• 4.16 msec. |
| Interface |
• Serial ATA 3Gb/s |
| Supported SATA Data Transfer Mode |
• 300 Gbits/s |
| SATA II Hotplug Capability |
• Yes |
| Maximum Height |
• 26.1 mm |
| Maximum Width |
• 101.6 mm |
| Maximum Length |
• 146.99 mm |
| Maximum Weight |
• 690 g |
| Power Requirements |
• +12V DC |
Voltage Tolerance |
• 12V ± 10 % |
| Seek Power (Typical) |
• 12.6 W |
| Operating Power (Typical) |
• 13.0 W |
| Idle Mode (Typical) |
• 7.4 W |
| Ambient Temperature |
• 0 °C to 60 °C
(Operating) |
| Maximum Operating
Shock |
• 63 G |
| Maximum Non-Operating
Shock |
• 350 G |
| Idle Drive Acoustics |
• 2.8 bels (Typical) |
| Seek Drive Acoustics |
• 3.2 bels (Typical) |
| Performance Seek Drive Acoustics |
• 3.7 bels (Typical) |
| Contact Start-Stop Cycles |
• 50,000 Cycles |
| Non-Recoverable Read Errors |
• 1 error per 1014 bits read |
| Service Life |
• 5 Years |
| Warranty |
• 5 Years Limited Warranty |
* Our New Review System
ARP is committed to developing new ways to improve your experience with us. As part of our continuous efforts to improve the value of our reviews to you, we are implementing a new review system.
This new review system is designed to allow you to quickly receive information on the latest hardware. This new system also allows you to quickly get the gist of the review without reading through it. This can be very useful, especially in situations where you need to make a quick purchase decision.
In this new system, we start with a Product Overview whenever a company sends us a press release about their latest product. We shift through extraneous PR-talk to create a straightforward summary of the product's features as well as specifications. This allows you to quickly find out all the pertinent details about the product, without reading through official press releases.
When we receive the product for review, we will quickly take photos of it and create a Pictorial Review. The purpose of a pictorial review is to allow you, the reader, to quickly examine the product visually. It may help you make better purchase decisions, especially if you cannot wait for the full review.
After thorough testing, we will post a Comprehensive Review of the product. This adds on to the pictorial review with comprehensive test results and our final conclusion on the product.
But no matter whether you are reading a Pictorial Review or a Comprehensive Review, you can always read the summary of the review as well as examine the product's specifications right on the first page. In all our new reviews, we will maintain the first page as a Product Overview page. If the product is listed in PriceGrabber, you can also check out the lowest price online.
We hope this new review system will make your experience a lot more enjoyable and informative!
