Seagate is at it yet again with more cutting edge technology that will dramatically increase the performance of the PC. Today we have a pair of 500gb Seagate 7200.9 SATA hard drives for the new 3gb per/s SATA interface cards. Did I just read that right? 500gb hard drives that transfer data at 3gb per second? Can that be right? To answer this I had to contact the hard drive gurus over at Seagate and ask them myself. The answer to the 3gb per/s question is that is the maximum transfer rate of the interface card itself, NOT the hard drives. In fact, the maximum data transfer rate that the 7200.9 is rated is actually only 60mb per second, not 3gb per second. The 3gb per/s can only be obtained with hard drives running in a RAID Array. I imagine it will be quite some time before we see a single storage unit transfer data at 3gb per second.

     With Seagate test data and talking papers on the subject in hand, I've seen some pretty wild benchmark results out there on the web that really make me question review site honesty and integrity. Not to take away anything from Seagate, but I just read a review on an unnamed review site that showed a single 7200.9 hard drive faster than a competitor's SATA 150 hard drives in RAID 0. It looked impressive, but you really have to raise the BS flag when those results are more than 2 or 3 times faster than Seagate's own test data. The facts are, the Seagate 7200.9 is physically limited to transferring data at only 60mb per second. That is straight off of Seagate's own test data. I'm not picking on Seagate, it's not their fault that some sites don't know the difference between burst rates and transfer rates. If you are testing a drive in burst rates only, that is a completely different story. Burst rates depend almost entirely on the hard drive cache memory, the speed of the interface card, and the overall speed of the computer. The Seagate 7200.0 has a massive 16mb cache, so burst rates are going to be extremely high. Burst rates should be even higher on a 3gb per/s interface card, even faster on a top end computer with fast RAM and CPU, but that doesn't measure a hard drive's true performance. Burst rates are great for small bits of data, but when it comes to large file transfers such as when you open a computer game or play movies, your load time is in direct relation to the transfer rate of the hard drive. I hate to ramble on like this, but I wanted to make sure that everyone reading this article understands the the difference between burst rates and true data transfer rates. With that out of the way, let's move on to some incredible 500gb goodness!

1 pair of 500gb hard drives. In RAID 0, that calculates to nearly a terabyte of hard drive goodness!

Let's see... How many MP3s does that average out to be???

Specifications