Seagate insiders contacted us early this morning with a few snippets of information (PDF) concerning the upcoming Barracuda 7200.10 series hard drives. Like other Barracuda drives, the 7200.10 series are based on 7,200RPM spindles.
Two 750GB models have already shown up on the Seagate website. The Barracuda 7200.10 ST3750640A (PATA) and the ST3750640SA (SATA) will be two new models we can look forward to seeing this year. The Seagate webpage reveals dozens of other NCQ-ready 7200.10 based products ranging from 200GB on up. Cache information was not available via the website yet, but the official Seagate PDF claims the Barracuda 7200.10 series will come with 16MB and 8MB buffers. Considering these two drives will be the best of breed for Seagate, it is fairly safe to assume these drives will have 16MB caches.
Seagate representatives have told us that the information posted was "very premature" and was not be posted on the website for several weeks. Seek time information has not been released yet, which has traditionally been considered the problem area for perpendicular recording devices. However, the 7200.10 datasheet claims all drives in the series will have a 4.16ms average latency time.
Several days ago Seagate announced its Cheetah 15K.5 series drives based on 15,000RPM platters. The Cheetah 15K.5 series also uses perpendicular recording to increase densities, but is solely limited to SCSI right now. Pricing is not available yet on either the 15K.5 or 7200.10 series. All Seagate hard drives