New 400GB Barracuda 7200.8 offers fast SATA NCQ performance and greater areal density than any other PC hard drive.

Seagate Technology (NYSE:STX), the world's number one hard drive maker, today announced it is shipping the world's highest capacity PC hard drive to retail stores, resellers and system builders worldwide. The Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 hard drive gives customers up to 400GB, and with the industry's highest data density it's the first hard drive to store up to 133GB on a single disc. This technology advantage enables Seagate to use fewer discs and heads and ensures the fastest performance and greatest reliability of any PC hard drive in its class.

The Barracuda 7200.8 continues Seagate's interface leadership with the most advanced single-chip native Serial ATA (SATA) interface with native command queuing (NCQ), for a significant performance boost. And as the industry's quality leader, Seagate provides an unrivaled five-year warranty on all internal hard drives shipped through its retail and distribution channels.

Seagate's native SATA interface technology with NCQ enables the Barracuda 7200.8 to match the performance of 10,000-rpm SATA drives without sacrificing capacity, and at a much more economical cost per gigabyte. The Barracuda 7200.8 with NCQ benefits applications like high-performance PCs such as gaming systems and workstations, PC-based home media servers and entry-level SATA servers. In addition, NCQ can make booting, application loading and file copying faster for everyday mainstream users.

Now consumers and system integrators can choose the fast new Barracuda 7200.8 - the world's most popular and trusted family of hard drives - in a wider variety of capacities, for a wide range of PC and entry-level server storage applications. Seagate continues to innovate to deliver the latest technologies first, and to closely partner with customers to meet their performance, reliability and support needs.

"Leveraging operational excellence is key to bringing new technology and products to market first and Seagate's Barracuda 7200.8, with its industry leading areal density and SATA NCQ technologies, is one such example," said Dave Reinsel, director of storage research at IDC. "Seagate's investments in common design platforms, advanced manufacturing, and Six Sigma design and quality processes, have also contributed to its ability over the past several years to deliver reliable, high-quality products."

NCQ provides a new advantage in today's systems with Hyper-Threading Technology, which allows multiple applications to send I/O requests at the same time. NCQ boosts performance still more when applications take advantage of Asynchronous I/O. In addition, NCQ increases drive reliability in heavy workloads by eliminating much of the mechanical wear and tear that a non-NCQ drive must endure to transfer the same amount of data.

The newest generation of the world's most popular PC hard drive family, the Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 provides fast performance with 8MB or 16MB cache sizes, a 7,200-rpm spin speed, and an 8.0-msec average seek time. With Seagate's patented SoftSonic fluid dynamic bearing motors, the Barracuda 7200.8 is extremely quiet. Seagate's Barracuda 7200.8 offers capacities of 200GB, 250GB, 300GB and 400GB, and the option of a native SATA interface or an Ultra ATA interface. It features a five-year warranty that covers all parts and labor, plus free technical support even after the warranty ends. Ask for this and other Seagate products at Best Buy, CompUSA, Fry's, D&H, and other retail stores.