Introduction

The evolution of the desktop PC in the 21st century really has taken us for a very quick ride in the direction of Dual Channel memory, multiple core processors as well as multiple graphics cards for better gaming performance.

Although, there is one area of technology that has really taken a back seat while the rest of the personal computer advances, that being the storage systems - that’s right, the good old hard disk drive.

While the enthusiast doesn’t give their hard disk much of a thought other than how much space they have to store their data, gaining performance increases here simply go unnoticed compared to that of the CPU, memory or graphics system.

The hard disk is simply the slowest part of the computer system. CPU’s can transmit data in the form of gigabits per second, memory bandwidth goes over 5GB/s and graphics cards can handle data in the order of 38GB/s across its memory buses. But the trusty hard disk in most cases cannot deliver sustained data faster than about 60MB/s, simply put, going for the faster CPU isn’t going to be able to speed up your load times on games if you can’t get the data off the disk quickly enough.

In recent years, the advancement of the hard disk has started to become a major part of the PC industry with Serial ATA replacing the older Parallel standard that was used for over 10 years. Native Command Queuing or NCQ for short sped up the way the data is read off the drive, and now with perpendicular recording coming into the frey from companies like Seagate, we are now starting to see speed increases as much as what a magnetic recording device is capable of.

Today we have Seagate’s Barracuda 7200.10 desktop drive on the test bed, the first desktop drive to support this new technology and it comes with a whooping 750GB of storage space. Could this make a great late Christmas present? Let’s take a closer look!