Seagate adds teeth to Barracuda

Hard drive maker Seagate Technology today announced a beefed-up version of its Barracuda line of PC hard drives. The company said the new Barracuda 7200.7 and the Barracuda 7200.7 Plus drives offer up to 160GB of capacity and up to 8MB in cache memory, as well as a choice of either the Serial ATA interface or the older Parallel ATA interface.

The company also announced a new value product, the Barracuda 5400.1 hard drive. That model, a 40GB drive aimed at low-cost PCs and emerging markets such as digital video recorders, spins at a slower speed of 5,400 revolutions per minute. However, the Barracuda 5400.1 is thinner than most desktop hard drives, which Seagate says helps the drive work better in a computer system that does not use a fan for cooling.