Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 500GB Hard Disk Review

The 7200.8 update was the drive that the 7200.7 should have been, and now we have the 7200.9 which meets the SATA2.5 specification. The headline change is the move from a 150MB/sec interface to 300MB/sec but we all know that this will bring minimal benefit when you are running a single hard drive as 150MB/sec offers plenty of headroom. Instead we should concentrate on the less obvious changes such as the addition of Native Command Queuing which is intended to transfer data more quickly between the hard drive and processor.

Other changes between the 7200.8 and 7200.9 are small but welcome with the idle acoustic level dropping from 2.8bels to 2.5-2.8bels depending on the model, idle power consumption drops from 7.2W to 6.9W, the seek power consumption drops from 12.4W to 8.1W, and the new drives use ClickConnect which should prevent your SATA cable from coming loose. Internally the 7200.9 continues to use a spin speed of 7,200rpm and hence a rotational latency of 4.16ms with an average seek time of 11ms.

..The 7200.9 is fast, quiet and good value, but its new SATA2.5 features appear to cause problems without offering any tangible benefits at present.

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