Hitachi and Seagate are two of the leading manufacturers for harddrives and they have both been pushing the development fast forward lately. We have earlier reported about perpendicular recording which makes it possible to store more data on the same area and even if we haven’t seen a breakthrough for this yet we still have access to really big harddrives today.
Hitachi Deskstar 7K400 400GB and Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 400GB are pretty much identical, with a small difference in accesstime, 0.5ms in Seagate’s advantage. Both are available with IDE or SATA-interface. The biggest difference between the two is that Seagate’s drive supports NCQ (Native Command Queuing) though, which seems to affect the performance negatively here. As usual it is nearly impossible to announce a winner as the results are very similar and even if one might win one test the next is won by the other with the same margin. The biggest reason for picking one over the other seems to be the price, but even there the difference is quite small.
