Serial ATA hard drives, although still a little hard to find, are finally available! Thanks to Seagate, we can now take advantage of the performance SATA has promised. Seagate has sent over not one, but TWO 120gb Barracuda Serial ATA V hard drives. Sure, I've been wanting to try out a single SATA hard drive for a long time, but I've been looking forward to running SATA RAID even more!

     Over the past couple months, my crew and I have been playing around with SATA adapters and SATA controllers. As much as I've been looking forward to Serial ATA, it really doesn't offer you any data transfer performance increase while using today's standard IDE hard drives with SATA to IDE adapters. Sure, some of these adapters work very well, but do not expect any kind of data transfer performance increase. However, SATA uses far less CPU resources, which does helps overall system performance. Now that we have true SATA hard drives, there should be at least some data transfer performance as well as lower CPU usage. In theory, Serial ATA should give our PCs a considerable performance increase. Let's find out!

Specifications

Capacity and Interface
Formatted Gbytes (512 bytes/sector)		120
Interface		Serial ATA
Performance
Internal Transfer Rate (Mbits/sec)		570
Max. External Transfer Rate (Mbytes/sec)		150
Avg. Sustained Transfer Rate (Mbytes/sec)		>44
Average Seek (msec)		9
Average Latency (msec)		4.16
Multisegmented Cache		8192
Spindle Speed (RPM)		7200
Configuration/Organization
Discs/Heads		2/4
Bytes per Sector		512
Logical CHS		//
Recording Method		EPRML (16,17)
Contact Start-Stops
SeaShield System		Yes
Reliability/Data Integrity
S.M.A.R.T. capable		Yes
Nonrecoverable Read Errors per Bits Read		1 per 1014
Service Life/Limited Warranty (years)		5/1
Power Requirements
+12 VDC +/-10% (amps typ operating)
+5 VDC +/-5% (amps typ operating)
Power Management (watts)
Seek		13.5
Read/Write		13
Idle		9.5
Standby		1.8
Environmental
Operating Temperature (°C)		0 to 60
Nonoperating Temperature (°C)		70 to -40
Operating Shock (Gs) @ 2 msec		63
Non Operating Shock (Gs) @ 2 msec		350
Acoustics,Idle (Bels-typ sound power)		2.5
Physical
Height (mm)		26.1
Width (mm)		101.85 >
Depth (mm)		146.56
Weight (kg)		0.544