Seagate's Barracuda V

Seagate is quick to point out that the Barracuda Serial ATA V was the first hard drive with native Serial ATA support to hit the market, but with the drives only available from a handful of retailers thus far, availability certainly isn't widespread. Fortunately, Seagate also has a parallel ATA version of the Barracuda V, giving us an opportunity to do as "apples-to-apples" a comparison between the performance of parallel and Serial ATA drives.

Apart from their support for different ATA standards, Seagate's Barracuda Vs are quite similar. At first glance, they're all but identical.

Other than a slight discoloration on the metal underside of the parallel ATA version of Seagate's Barracuda V and the different power plugs and data connectors on each drive, there's essentially no difference between the two. What is different about the Barracuda V series in general is the metal plate covering the drives' underbellies. At the very least, the plate gives the drive another layer of protection from physical damage, and it could act as a heat sink of sorts to pull heat away from the drive.

Both of the Barracuda V models we're testing today run at 7,200RPM and boast 8MB of cache. An ATA/100 version of the Barracuda V is available with a smaller 2MB cache. The ATA/100 models are only capable of 100MB/second peak transfer speeds, but that shouldn't hold back their performance in the least. Frankly, I'd be shocked to any ATA hard drive comes close to Serial ATA's current 150MB/sec transfer rate limit in the near future.

Both of the 120GB Barracuda V drives we tested use two platters, although parallel and Serial ATA versions of the drives are available in slightly different sizes. The parallel ATA version of the Barracuda V is available in 40, 60, 80, and 120GB sizes. The drive's Serial ATA counterpart is only available in 80 and 120GB models. Even today, 120GB seems like overkill for most, but hard drives have a way of filling themselves up if free space is available. Let's hope Seagate has larger drives on the way for Terabyte-craving enthusiasts.

Unfortunately, only one of Seagate's Barracuda V models offers more than a one-year warranty, and it's not the Serial ATA drive. The parallel ATA Barracuda V 8MB cache drive is considered a "Plus" model, so it includes a three year warranty, despite the fact that part of Seagate's web site lists the drive's warranty as only one year. Given that Serial ATA drives are premium products, the fact that Seagate's 8MB-cache Serial ATA Barracuda V only has a one-year warranty is disappointing, to say the least.