Home : Hardware : Reviews : Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1 TB Hard Drive
Seagate’s newest Barracuda is a great high-performance hard drive.
The 1 TB hard drive market hasn’t changed very much since the review of the Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 we posted back in the spring; only Western Digital and Seagate have joined Hitachi in breaking the 1 terabyte (1,000 gigabytes) barrier for internal hard drives built for consumers. In a way, I’m no more surprised now than I was when reviewing the Deskstar 7K1000; 1 TB is an enormous amount of space for someone to fill, even in these days of massive media collections, multi-gig operating systems and games that require DVD-sized installations. Once again, though, space isn’t the only reason why we look at the flagship hard drives: we want to see if they’re faster at delivering information from all of that space, too. Today we’ll be seeing how Seagate’s newest storage monster, the Barracuda 7200.11, does in comparison.
Installation
A SATA 3.0 GB/s drive (full specifications here), the Barracuda 7200.11 features the ease of installation that characterizes modern hard drives. Seagate did not send me installation instructions with my review sample, so I don’t know what sort of documentation the company provides for installations, but I can tell you that the online version of their instructions is missing one important note: that the Disk Management instructions Seagate links to on Microsoft’s site also apply to Windows Vista. Of course, if you’re doing a fresh installation of Windows onto your new disk you will likely not encounter any formatting problems, but anyone setting up the Barracuda 7200.11 should get some clue about how to set up their new hard disk in any version of Windows.
Performance
Now for the big question: how does the 7200.11 compare to Hitachi’s 1 TB hard drive? In addition to features now standard in SATA drives, like the Perpendicular Magnetic Recording technology that makes these enormous capacities possible, the Barracuda 7200.11 also features the same 32 MB cache size. However, Seagate’s found a way to squeeze more capacity out of each platter; it has four platters to the 7K1000’s five, which should mean an increase in performance (fewer platters means less seek time). Let’s find out how much these theoretical differences impact the bottom line. First, the specifications of the test computer:
- Processor: Intel Core2 Duo e6400 Processor
- Memory: 2 GB of Crucial DDR2 PC2-8500 Ballistix Tracer Dual Channel RAM
- Video Card: XFX GeForce 8800 GTS Fatal1ty Video Card
- Motherboard: XFX XFX nForce 680i LT SLI Motherboard
- Primary Hard Drive: Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 1 TB Hard Drive
- Secondary Hard Drive: Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 Hard Drive
- Power Supply: OCZ ModXStream 780W Power Supply
- Optical Drive: Pioneer DVD-115 DVD Drive
- OS: Windows Vista
- Testing Software:
- SiSoft Sandra Lite XI.SP2 2007.5.11.35
- Passmark Software PerformanceTest 6.1 (1003) WIN32
