"Hard drive maker Seagate Technology has started shipping a drive targeted at personal computers that offers 400GB of storage space."
400GB might seem excessive, but to tell the truth it no longer is. In these days of broadband, and the PC being the multimedia center it is, 400GB could be easily filled. Still, you do have to stop for a moment and think... wow!
This 400GB monster is the fourth member of Seagate's Barracuda 7200.8 series of drives. It is available in two versions, Ultra ATA and SATA. The 7200.8 figure means that the drives have a rotational speed of 7200 rpm, and have an average seek time of 8 milliseconds. What's especially nice about the SATA model is that it supports Native Command Queuing (NCQ), which allows the disk to manage multiple commands from the PC in a way that is efficient, logical and sensible, rather than just the linear order that they are received in. Seagate believes that this will lead to a 7200.8 drive that performs more like a 10,000 rpm drive.