Hard Disk: Seagate 500-Gbyte SATA-II Barracuda 9.2

Dec. 8, 2005

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...

William G. Wong

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.

About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

I still get a hand on software and electronic hardware. Some of this can be found on our Kit Close-Up video series. You can also see me on many of our TechXchange Talk videos. I am interested in a range of projects from robotics to artificial intelligence.