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Seagate Barracuda ATA II

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PCQ Bureau
New Update
Seagate Barracuda ATA II ST310210A
10.2 GB hard drive. Rs 5,500



Features: 7,200 rpm; 6.5 ms rated seek time; Ultra ATA/66 interface; 2 MB cache.


Pros: Very good performance for normal office use.


Cons: Seek time higher than rated.


Source: ACI Computers India


7/13 First Floor


Kalkaji Extension


New Delhi 110019. 


Tel: 11-6287551 Fax: 6287553 


E-mail: naresh@acicil.com  







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The ATA II is Seagate’s latest addition to the Barracuda

series of hard drives. It’s a 7,200 rpm drive with up to 30 GB available

capacities. We checked out the 10.2 GB model.

Considering

that it’s a 7,200 rpm drive, the price is very attractive. It comes to Rs 539

per GB, which is pretty low. At this price, the drive’s a great buy for home

use or normal office work.

To check the performance of the Barracuda, we ran the

Business Winstone99 benchmark. This runs popular Office suites to measure the

overall performance of a PC. The Barracuda excelled at this test, scoring 23.1,

which is higher than most drives we’ve reviewed in the past few months. In

transfer rates, its score stood at 4.6 MB/sec, which again were among the

highest.

The remaining scores were average. It gave a seek time of 13

ms, which is 4.5 ms more than its rated seek time. Its raw throughput (the raw

transfer rate achieved by the drive without involving the operating system) was

20.8 MB/sec–which is average–in spite of having a 2 MB cache buffer. The

Seagate U8 that we’d reviewed earlier (see PC Quest February 2000, page 151)

was able to perform better on this, with a raw throughput of 23 MB/sec. The

Barracuda loaded the processor by only 3.74 percent, which was slightly lower

than some of the other drives we’ve reviewed–such as the Seagate U8 (4.07

percent ), Seagate U4 (4.01 percent ), and the Quantum Fireball lct10 (3.94

percent ).

Overall, the drive gave us nothing to complain about, and is

a good buy at its price.

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