Storage Review verblijdt ons met een review van de Seagate Barracuda III ATA-harddrive. Deze schijf is inmiddels al een paar maanden verkrijgbaar, maar wordt desondanks nog niet al te veel gesignaleerd. Reviews die we er van gezien hebben waren lovend, vooral daar waar het de transfer-rates betreft, en ook voor wat betreft de bescheiden geluidsproductie van deze drives. Ook in deze review worden deze beide pluspunten onderschreven, echter men is niet bepaald gecharmeerd van de benchmarks die verkregen werden:
With an outer-zone transfer rate of 40.5 MB/sec, the Barracuda ATA III succeeds in displacing the IBM Deskstar 75GXP as the fastest ATA drive when it comes to sequential transfer rates. It's inner-zone score of 26.4 MB/sec is also easily the fastest we've encountered. The 'Cuda ATA III thus completes the yearly cycle in which ATA drives catch the fastest of SCSI drives… only to be outpaced as next-generation SCSI units arrive, of course.
Measured access time, unfortunately, is not nearly as impressive. The 'Cuda ATA III's score of 15.4 milliseconds yields a measured seek time of 11.2 ms… a figure that misses claims by more than 2 milliseconds. This is a phenomenon occurring too often these days in the face of ever increasing areal densities.
[...] Despite its record-breaking transfer rates, the Barracuda ATA III is no match for the category-leading Western Digital Caviar WD400BB. Seagate's offering trails WD's by a margin of 11% in the Business Disk WinMark 99. The gap in the High-End Disk WinMark is even greater- here the 'Cuda lags by 15%.
[...] The Barracuda ATA III's IOMeter Workstation Index (a normalized average of light, medium, and heavy loads) of 125.97 unfortunately can't keep up with the competition. Quantum's Fireball Plus AS, for example, outscores the Seagate by 16%. An IOMeter top-dog such as the IBM Deskstar 75GXP makes it even worse, with the 'Cuda lagging by 24%.
[...] The Barracuda ATA III features nearly non-existent idle noise, something that's becoming more and more common as time goes by. Question is, is this a result of advancing mechanisms or of the slowly deteriorating platter counts in ATA drives? Who knows… both are probably factors. The 'Cuda's seek noise is noticeable when performing fully random seeks, but hardly obtrusive. The drive remains quite cool even after extended use.
[...] Overall, the Barracuda ATA III's disappointing showing in WinBench99 and IOMeter leave Western Digital's Caviar WD400BB at the top of the current-generation heap. With the WD400BB offering better performance and the Quantum Fireball Plus AS offering higher capacities, its hard to see where the 'Cuda III fits in. One place may be in cost-sensitive applications that require little else other than high sequential transfer rates. In addition, we have to point out that the 'Cuda ATA series has traditionally excelled in price; the original, for example, shattered price barriers by being the first to deliver capacity at just one American cent per megabyte. Perhaps the 'Cuda III will enjoy a similar advantage. Nonetheless, sharp competition remains right around the corner with Maxtor's DiamondMax Plus 60 as well as a bit further off from manufacturers such as IBM and Fujitsu.
Samengevat dus wel technische hoogstandjes als 't op de transfer-rates aankomt, maar in de 'alledaagse' benchmarks komt deze drive dus niet zo lekker uit de bus! Nu maar hopen dat de prijs 'prettig' laag komt te liggen, da's natuurlijk altijd een argument om een drive wel te kopen, al is 't niet moeders snelste 
Wie 't allemaal nog eens precies wil bekijken kan hier terecht. Met dank aan bas voor de melding!
, maar komt het er stomweg niet uit 
. Of de koppies moven niet zo snel ofzo, of is er minder cache. Kan allemaal inhouden dat ie daarom niet zo super snel is. Maarjah, das beetje jammere conclusie. Over het algemeen is die Cuda reeks wel lekker snel, al is die eerste een beetje noisy en snel lekker warm.