Seagate’s 7200.9 500-Gbyte SATA-II hard drive provides the kind of speed and storage necessary for high-performance game play and multimedia recording. There is plenty of room for a PVR like Hauppauge’s WinTV-PVR-350 to save lots of video.
The SATA-II interface operates at 3 Gbit/s. It has an average access time of 4.16 ms. The drive has 16 Mbytes of cache and packs in an extra platter to hit the half terabyte mark. The SoftSonic motor spins the platters at 7200 rpm in almost complete silence (about 3 bels) letting you hear the video or game instead of the PC. As with more and more products, the 7200.9 is RoHS compliant.
The drive has a five-year warranty. Some of this can be traced to the enhanced G-Force protection. It handles 63G shocks while running and 350Gs when not. SATA power and data cable connections made setup very simple.