Not too long ago, hard drives with larger capacities needed multiple platters to accommodate alot of data. Currently, one platter accommodates as much as a 500 GB, thanks to the advancements in perpendicular recording technology. A fine example is the 1 TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.12. With two platters-at 7200 rpm-and four heads this 1 TB hard drive stores as much as 25,000 MP3 tracks or approximately 140 DivX movies.

Apart from multimedia, it's good for workstations, high-end gaming PCs and HTPCs. A couple of them paired in RAID, are ideal for hosting websites. Insert it into an external casing with an eSATA port, and you'll have a fast and roomy external storage device. Also, fewer platters need lesser power.

Name: Seagate Barracuda 7200.12.jpg Views: 119 Size: 27.8 KB

We tested it for read/write speed using the file system benchmark in SiSoft Sandra 2009 as a synthetic test and the file transfer test for a real-world scenario. The drive yielded an index of. 100.59 MB/s, which is very good. Other synthetic benchmark scores were also impressive. For the real-world scenario, we copied a large file from a RAM drive to this hard drive. We then reversed the process to check the read speed. After repeating this process with multiple files, we concluded that the write speed is where this drive trounces even some 1.5 and 2 TB drives out there. Overall, this drive is a great performer.