Thread: Seagate's Barracuda 7200. Hard Drive analyze

We lately obtained a newsletter praising Seagate's 7200. Believe about that for a moment. One point five terabytes of storage costs simply twelve cents a gigabyte. Now that's cost effective storage.

On the surface this Seagate drive isn't a wimp, either. It's got 32MB of cache, spins at 7200RPM, defends NCQ and SATA I/O 3.0gbps speeds. But how does the drive execute? We piled up this Seagate behemoth against the modern crop of three platters, 1TB drives.

If we assume a expect at the introductory specs, as they're staked on the Seagate Web site, the drive seems to be a beneficial performer.

Seagate's large drive reaches its tremendous capacity by using four platters. Still so, that's an impressive 375GB per platter, higher than the 333GB per platter of the new gathering of 3 platters, 1TB drives.

There are a some things that may presage somewhat slower performance. The head forum, with its eight heads, is likely slightly more heavy than one with six heads. Those deviations are likely minor, but we'll see if we find any strike in the testing.

We equated performance of the 7200.11 with various top executing hard drives, admitting the Western Digital RE3 and Hitachi E7K1000. Like those drives, the 7200.11 provides a five year warranty.

All the drives were tried on this system. The system was establish with Intel's ICH10R I/O controller hub set to RAID mode. All drives were tried in RAID mode; on Intel's chip sets, RAID mode defends all the advanced characteristics of modern hard drives, admitting Native Command Queuing (NCQ) and 3gbps SATA I/O speeds.