It's been a long time since hard drive manufacturer Seagate produced their first storage device for home PCs in 1980 with their 5MB Winchester drive. Comdex98 saw a much different Seagate, one that boasted of upcoming 50GB drives and support for new transfer protocols as the year 2000 looms.

For Sharky Extreme readers, hard drives are an important part of their system's raw speed, and game playing capability. A slow hard drive can cause a deathmatch to freeze in mid-stride, only to find the player dead after the machine resumes its normal speed. Even Win98 can bog down quickly with a slow hard drive propelling it, and no amount of fooling with the virtual memory settings can restore happiness. (Here's a quick tip for speedier Win98 hard drive usage from PC Magazine: In your virtual memory settings under "File System" change the role of your machine from "Desktop Computer" to "Network Server". Also, make sure you manually adjust your Virtual Memory setting to a level that is approximately 3x the amount of your total system's ram. Ex: If you've got 64MB of SDRAM, change your virtual memory level to a maximum of 192MB.)

Seagate's mainstream product line keeps upping the bar for raw speed, and the new Barracuda and Cheetah "LP" models are good examples. Using Seagate's tried and true 10,000 and 7,200rpm spindle engines, the LP models add enhancements and optimizations to increase total data throughput by almost 25% versus the previous generation of Cheetah and Barracuda drives.

All of the 10,000rpm hard drives from Seagate still require a SCSI host adapter, specifically one that supports either Ultra Wide or Ultra2 protocols. There are no plans for a Seagate 10,000rpm UltraDMA drive to appear until the newer UltraDMA/66 standard takes hold sometime in Q2/99. UltraDMA/66 doubles the maximum bandwidth of UltraDMA/33 to…you guessed it…66MBs/per second. Intel's upcoming Katmai specific core logic chipset, "Camino", will most likely be the first time UltraDMA/66 is supported in large global sales numbers. There were a few mainboards at the show with 440BX chipsets that claimed to support UltraDMA/66, but none were in operating machines.

Look for the new LP drives to hit the market in February.