Ultra ATA 66 Hard Drive Roundup - March 2000

The Seagate Barracuda ATA line of drives is Seagate’s attempt to bring some of the performance of their popular SCSI line into the IDE drive market. Keeping with its SCSI based namesake, the Barracuda ATA offer outstanding performance and an excellent value for you dollar as it outperformed all of the drives in this roundup in raw disk transfer speeds.

The Barracuda ATA ST328040A that we reviewed is a 28 GB hard drive that also features a 7200 RPM rotational speed, 512 KB data buffer, 8 ms average seek times, and utilizes the Ultra ATA/66 interface.

Seagate rates this drive as having a sustained data transfer rate of >15 MB/sec, which was substantiated by our benchmarking. Using the Winbench Data Transfer Test, the Seagate Barracuda ATA delivered 28 MB/sec transfers on the outer tracks and stayed above 18.5 MB/sec on the inner tracks, well above the published claim. In fact the Seagate Barracuda kept a healthy 4 MB/sec lead over the nearest competitors, the IBM Deskstar 34 GXP and Western Digital Expert. Although it ran away with the show in the sustained data transfer tests, the Seagate fell into second place behind the IBM 34 GXP and WD Expert combination.

Since the Seagate really only shined its brightest during the sustained transfer tests, we cannot crown it as absolute victor. Instead we have determined that if you are the type of user that benefits from high-sustained transfer rates, and you use your hard drive for this type of activity often (video and/or sound editing comes to mind), then you would benefit from the Seagate Barracuda and by all means grab it. If you mainly use your hard drive for infrequent access to your data (business apps, general home and gaming use), with occasional sustained transfers, you might be better off going with either the IBM Deskstar 34 GXP or Western Digital Expert drive that we reviewed.

The Seagate Barracuda ATA is a very solid performer and blows away the competition when it comes to sustained data transfers, as it maintained a healthy 4 MB/sec gap from its closest competitor. It is highly recommended if you need a drive that can handle streaming data sessions, such as video editing, and for some reason you want to stick with ATA drives over SCSI. The Barracuda ATA ran a bit warmer than the other drives in operation, we suspect it may be doing a bit more than 7200 RPM, and was a bit noisier than the other drives, especially during the random access tests. The Seagate Barracuda ATA has a 3 year warranty and can be found for around $220.00.