Introduction

 

Hard disk drives, one of the oldest forms of storage in the PC, are still being used to this day. Granted they have had a number of changes, they are still using the same principles that were used at their invention, a spinning metal disk inside a vacuum sealed container with magnetic heads to read and write data to and from the drive.

 

Over the past 10 years we have seen speeds increase not only in the rotation speed of the drive but also the transfer protocol, from a mere 5MB/s now up to speeds hitting 300MB/s. Its easy to see where the slowest part of your PC still lies, the magnetic storage units like HDD's and FDD's.

 

While still the slowest part of the PC, hard disk companies like Seagate have put as much time and effort as they humanly can into increasing the abilities of the current technology, and building on the future of the HDD market. Today we have in our labs the Seagate Barracuda 7200.9, Seagate's 9th generation desktop hard disk drive. This drive is built on the same technology that saw the 7200.8 dominate the HDD market and added some extra features to the mix.

 

So how does it stack up compared to its predecessor? Come and take a look.