I N THE HARD DRIVE WORLD, capacity is king. Capacity actually comes in two flavors. The first and most obvious is the storage capacity of a hard drive. The second, and potentially more important, is the capacity of individual platters within a drive. This platter capacity is known as the areal density, and it can do more than just increase the amount of data a drive can hold. Higher areal densities allow drives to offer more storage capacity with fewer platters, potentially lowering noise levels, cutting power consumption, and reducing the risk of a catastrophic head crash. As if that weren't enough, higher areal densities can also improve performance by allowing the drive head to access the same amount of data over a shorter physical distance.

Seagate's new Barracuda 7200.9 family of Serial ATA hard drives packs storage capacity on both fronts, with one model weighing in at a hefty half-terabyte and another packing a single 160GB platter whose areal density is 25% higher than its closest competitor. We've rounded up both models and run them through a brutal gauntlet of storage tests against earlier Barracudas and drives from Hitachi, Maxtor, and Western Digital. Read on to see how the 7200.9s compare. The Barracuda 7200.9 500GB (left) and 160GB (right) While 125GB platters aren't all that special, no one can match Seagate's ultra-dense 160GB platters. Only Seagate's own 133GB platters come close, and even then, the 160GB platters offer a 25% jump in areal density. That allows the 160GB Barracuda 7200.9 to be built using just a single platter, with all of the attendant advantages of fewer platters.

Firmware update information for Barracuda 7200.12 Serial ATA. Barracuda 7200.12 Firmware Update. The terms and conditions of your Seagate warranty for the. Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 - hard drive - 80 GB - SATA 3Gb/s overview and full product specs on CNET.

Firmware update information for certain Barracuda 7200.11 Serial ATA. Firmware Update for ST3500320AS. The terms and conditions of your Seagate warranty. Barracuda 7200.9 Serial ATA Product Manual, Rev. C 3 2.0 Drive specifications Unless otherwise noted, all specifications are measured under ambient conditions, at 25.

The 160GB model's denser platter should also provide a nice performance boost. You won't find 160GB platters in drives larger than 160GB, though, and these platters aren't available in drives with more than 8MB of cache, either.

Fortunately, all members of the Barracuda 7200.9 family are covered by Seagate's fantastic five-year warranty. This longer warranty term is usually reserved for SCSI drives and enterprise-class products, while desktop hard drives from other manufacturers are generally only covered for three years. Seagate, however, warrants its entire internal hard drive line for five years. Odin Not Detecting S3 In Mode.

If the laptop is also XP, the drive should be recognized without problems. Sometimes this may not happen if the disk is unusually partitioned (could happen if you manually dual-booted it with Linux, for example). Verify the enclosure is working properly and has enough power supplied to, and that it appears in Device Manager. If all this applies, the enclosure must be considered working and the problem might be in the partitioning or disk access.

In XP Pro, do Start >Run Command >DISKMGMT.MSC and press OK. See whether the disk appears (if it doesn't, it's the enclosure, or its drivers - or the disk was dying and is now dead, but that's not very likely), select the NTFS or FAT32 partition - ignore any others - right click and mount the unit as drive, say, G.