It’s difficult to discuss this new drive without providing a quick reminder of how it’s different than the Hitachi drive since obvious parallels will be drawn by folks. Seagate has equipped this unit with a 32 Megabyte buffer – the largest in the industry so far and secondly, it also has the highest areal density platters which are 250GB each. Hitachi’s drive uses five 200GB platters in its 1GTB unit.

Seagate uses technology in this drive which makes it very quiet – in fact, under a full load you can barely hear any of the normal “ticking” sounds at all. The only real potential concern would be heat – like many of today’s 7200rpm drives which have multiple platters in them, the heat levels can get out of hand if not properly cooled; especially in a RAID setup. I’d advise anyone looking at any of today’s high-performing hard drives, regardless of brand, to always make sure your case has adequate cooling for the hard drives. They have a thankless job of keeping all of your important data in tact so the least you could do is throw them a freakin’ fan or two.

The SATA II interface does mean that you can stack quite a few drives up before you need to worry about saturating the 3Gb of bandwidth on the bus and it also allows the drive to have a very high burstable data throughput. One thing you’ll want to note is that Seagate (for some odd reason) ships some of the drives with a little jumper on it which forces the drive to a SATA 1 mode for compatibility. Performance suffers quite a bit with this jumper on so you’ll want to make sure to remove it if you notice one on your drive.

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