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The 7200.9 range of Seagate drives covers capacities from 40GB up to a
massive 500GB with 2, 8 and 16MB buffers.
The Barracuda 7200.9 ST3500641AS is one of the 500GB capacity four-platter
drives and comes with a 16MB cache, a 7,200rpm spin speed, NCQ (native command
queuing) and is one of the few drives around that has the new Sata (Serial ATA)
3Gbits/sec interface (capable of a 300Mbytes/sec transfer rate).
There is also a Pata (Parallel ATA) version (model ST3500641A) for those
without a Sata interface.
The drive does get warm while in use, so make sure there is good ventilation
in any case in which you use the disk.
Hard disk storage is cheap these days, but there's still a lot of technology and acronyms to get your head round, from spindle speed and areal density, to ATA and Raid. We reveal all 15 Feb 2006