| Hitachi Deskstar 7K400 vs Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 400 GB |
|
We've seen a slew of tests with these drives, some predictable, some not. It was surprising to see that when Native Command Queuing was enabled on the Seagate hard drive that it actually had a small negative impact on performance. However, NCQ seemed to shine some light on the game loading tests, maybe a dim light, but a light nevertheless. It's not that huge of a deal saving around a second of loading time when it comes to game.
When it comes to the Hitachi and Seagate drives head to head there is no clear winner, both drives prove to overcome each other in different tests. Though let's not forget about the best part of these drives, they are 400GB! Personally, I could install every game, program, mp3, etc. that I own and I likely would not come close to filling one of these monsters. These drives are aimed at the ones who need a load of hard drive space, for video editing for example.
On the price side of things, looking with Dealtime.com we see that currently as of this review date you can pick up the Seagate drive for about $283 USD, and the Hitachi drive for about $265 USD. As they are fairly new products they are rather pricey as expected, considering you can pick up a couple 250GB hard drives for around the same price or cheaper. With the latter you end up with more space and increased performance if you were to set the drives up in RAID.
Overall these drives are excellent monster drives. They are both worthy of your buy if you want to pay that little extra.