Verdict: Large capacity, low performance

Seagate appears to have taken over Hitachi's mantle when it comes to packing the most bits per square inch onto a hard disk. The Barracuda achieves its gargantuan capacity by having the highest areal density of any currently available hard disk drive - 133GB per platter.

In theory, this should give it a distinct performance advantage, as packing more data onto each platter means more bits flying past the read/write heads per second. However, although the HD Tach 3 RW sustained read and write transfer results were second only to the Samsung SpinPoint P120S, the 400GB Barracuda's access time was the slowest on test. So, like its 250GB brother, this drive ended up being distinctly underwhelming in our real-world tests. It was one of the slower drives in Paint Shop Pro, and its Far Cry level loading lagged noticeably behind other drives too.

As with all the large drives this month, you pay a premium for the capacity as well. The 400GB Barracuda is just as expensive per gigabyte as the Hitachi 7K500 and Western Digital Caviar RE2. However, the 400GB Caviar SE16 is noticeably cheaper, so if you really do need 400GB in one drive, then the Western Digital will make your money go further, and give you better performance too.

Fortunately for Seagate, there's a glimmer of hope on the horizon, in the form of the forthcoming Barracuda 7200.9 series, which will add 16MB of cache and S-ATA II support, and offer a 500GB model. Stay tuned for a full review.

• Cases - 21st November 2008
• Motherboards - 24th October 2008
• Gaming Headsets - 26th September 2008
• Dream PCs - 24th September 2008
• Headphones - 12th September 2008
• Media PC components - 22nd August 2008
• PSUs - 14th July 2008

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