This Seagate's New 2TB Hard Drive is a low-power drive, meant to conserve power. So it spins at a curiously unique speed of 5900 RPM (as against usual spinning speeds of 5400 and 7200 RPM), and has a 32 MB buffer. Similar to all other 2TB drives on the market currently, it stores 500 GB per platter, using 4 platters in total. It barely got warm to the touch. Vibration is almost non-existent in single-drive configurations, but pairing this drive with another similar one caused a fair bit of vibration in a desktop PC, although still tolerable. This d,ive, although fast, is not targeted at the performance market, and is good for use in HTPC (home-theater PC), NAS boxes, and other such purposes where the drive's data capacity is important.

Sea gate claims power usage of 3.3W at idle and 6.8W during operation, which is good for saving power if you are replacing multiple smaller drives with this one. This drive spins at a lower speed than the Barracuda 7200.12 series, so we didn't expect it to get anywhere close to their performance numbers, but we were pleasantly surprised. We run synthetic benchmarks and real world tests on our testbench to eliminate bottlenecks. We measured a read speed average of 91.9 MB/s, and write speed average of 89.5 MB/s. Real world file read/write speeds stood at 104.35 MB/s for a single large file (6.42 GB), but fell to 72.3 MB/s as expected, when copying multiple smaller files (1287 files totaling up to 2.33 GB). Transferring files from the first partition to a second on the same drive was at a poor speed of 13.79 MB/s. Read and write access times averaged 15.8 ms and 8.97 ms respectively. These performance numbers are good and are only slightly lower than today's best mainstream desktop hard drives.

Seagate offers a five year warranty on this drive.