Seagate Barracuda Hard Disk

Price: Rs 20,000 (5 yrs warranty)

Key Specs: NCQ, 500 GB, 16 MB cache, SATA 3 Gbps, 7200 rpm

Contact: eSys Distribution, Delhi. Tel: 51811694.E-Mail id: naresh@esysmail.com  RQS# E30 or SMS 130330 to 9811800601

This half terabyte hard disk by Seagate is meant for those

who need to store large amounts of data, like graphic designers. Compared to the 400 GB version of the same

Barracuda drive (reviewed in the January 2006), this one is up by 100 GB and has

an increased cache of 8 MB. It's also Rs 3000 cheaper as compared to its older

cousin. But performance wise, it has taken a dip compared to its predecessor.

The hard disk functions very quietly and like the 400 GB

one, it also supports the 3 Gbps SATA interface. In any office

environment, the quiet operation is important and this hard drive keeps with

that rule. The 400 GB version was tested in an NCQ enabled ASUS A8N-E

motherboard with an nForce4 motherboard.

To maximize benefit from the NCQ technology, that is one of

the unique features of this disk, we require an NCQ compatible motherboard and

programs that are optimized for multi-threaded input-output operations. We used

the NCQ supporting MSI Diamond Plus with Athlon X2 4200+ processor, 1 GB RAM,

loaded with Win XP Pro SP1 OS to test this hard drive. We also used the WinBench

99 and Winstone '02 benchmarks to  evaluate its performance. For business

disk Winmark and high-end disk Winmark it scored 12 and 26 respectively as

opposed to 20 and 45 for the 400 GB version. With the Winstone '02 benchmark

we got a score of 46.

Bottom Line: With a price of

Rs 20,000, a warranty of five years and half a terabyte disk space, this hard

drive is a good buy for those who need to store multi-GB files and other

application files that can't be put on server storage. This can also be put

into versatile use as entry-level server storage in small office environments.

Abe Kurian