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Wednesday April 26, 2006
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 Today Seagate announced the latest salvo in the large drive wars: the Barracuda 7200.10 drive in 200-750GB capacities. This means that heavy downloaders and home video geeks around the world will be able to put 3/4 TB data single drives in their desktops. Using 4GB as the standard measure of a 2 hour DVD movie, that means that the drive can hold almost 200 movies in storage or hundreds of thousands of MP3s or pictures. All I have to say is that you really need to own a camcorder or use your broadband 24/7 to utilize 750GB.
Seagate's 7200.10 drives support 8-16MB caches, Native Command Queuing (NCQ) and up to 3.0Gbps SATA throughput, so they are fast. Seagate uses Perpendicular technology to stuff more data on to the same number of platters as the previous generation 7200.9 drives. They're expected to ship next week, so keep your eyes tuned to the online retailers to see who is first on your block with a 3TB four drive RAID 0 array. The 750GB version will retail for about $590.
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April 27, 2006 12:56 PM
The heck with MP3s. This is what those of us that want to preserve our CDs in all their glory, with no clipped highs or lows, have been waiting for. Why compress when you don't have too? This drive will be a great improvement to comsumer audio media setups. Currently I use a CD jukebox that holds 110 CDs. My collection is way over 300+. Throw a good shuffle app on this baby, and I am in heaven. No repeats for days, if not months!!
April 27, 2006 1:20 PM
I have concerns about longer-term reliability of perpendicular recording, and will wait until these drives have been in use for at least a year. Since they use SATA 3G and since they sport humonguous capacity, ann end-user like myself will want to keep this drive running for several years. What happens when your treasure trove of thousands of MP3's and hundreds of DIVx videos gets wiped out? Backup strategy becomes both more complex and more critical as total storage increases. This announcement is a good sign and I'm optimistic, but not hurrying to pick one up.
April 27, 2006 3:10 PM
With 250GB WD drives for under $100, I can get the same capacity as this drive for less than $300. Throw int external expansion cases and the price goes up to $375 which makes the same storage portable. It is a good sign that the drive manufacturers are looking at increasing their capacity, but as with others, I am willing to wait until the price drops.
May 2, 2006 11:29 AM
I have to agree with Alain, I plan on building a media center pc and that size of hard drive would be great but if it were to fail on me after a year that would be one large pain in the a..
May 2, 2006 9:00 PM
I long ago implemented a 2 drive setup in each of my PCs.1 for everyday use and 1 for backup. Drives are so cheap now I believe its the only practical way to backup larger HDs. A Ghost script or something similar and you clone the drive with a process so simple a 10 year old can do it with ease. Then (when) it fails (and it will) you swap drives in minutes and you're back up and running like nothing happend. By this time next year that $590 price on the new drive will be half or less. I can wait.