Seagate 120GB 7200RPM SATA-150 Hard Drive with NCQ
This drive is a newer drive from Seagate, who are well known in the hard drive industry. This drive will certainly set some high standards in terms of speed.
This drive utilises SATA-150 a newish technology which aims to speed up the information stransfer between to and from the hard drive.
It has a 7200RPM rotation speed. Although not the fastest, when you compare it to some of the 10,000RPM offerings, which usually appear on SCSI drives 2 times the price or more. It’s also a darn sight better than the standard 5400RPM which was usual for drives for quite a while.
It has a low seek time of under 9.5 seconds and average latency of 4.16 seconds.
All of these things combined result in a drive which is very fast. Compared to the average hard drive you will see a marked increase in performance.
But the most special thing about this drive is NCQ. NCQ stands for Native Command Queuing. What this does is to maximise performance of the drive by dynamically deciding which things need to be read in which order. As drives are just large discs rotating, if the read/write head has to wait for the drive to spin the whole way round, it takes longer to perform the operation. What native command queuing does is it allows other operations to be place ahead of that one so they can be performed as their part of the disc spins under the head. For a detailed spec you can have a look at this whitepaper on the subject.
With all this technology, this drive will certainly impress in terms of speed and reliability. If you are looking to spruce up your gaming performance or do lots of hard drive intensive work like video or audio editing, this drive is for you.