Anandtech has an article up benchmarking the 7200.9 a 500 Gigabyte SATA hard drive with 3.0Gbps transfer rate and a 16mb buffer.

Oddly enough the 7200.9 with native command queuing (NCQ) did only slightly better in real world tests, while doing worse in many benchmark tests.

Seagate’s 500GB 7200.9 performed exceptionally well in the game level loading tests, especially with Doom 3 and C&C: Generals. Half-Life 2 wasn’t so forgiving, but two out of three games isn’t bad. It also performed well in the File Zip operations as well as the Multitasking scenario where we zip a file within the drive while we import 400MB worth of emails in an Outlook account.

The 500GB 7200.9 does not perform better than some of the older 3.0Gb/sec drives that we had looked at a few months back, but its capacity may be enough to give Hitachi’s 500GB offering some competition.

I thought Native Command Queuing would be much better for the drive, and the 3.0Gb/s transfer rate would come close to giving Western Digital Raptor drives a run for their money, but the tests say otherwise.

Check out the article for detailed information on the drive.