Seagate’s latest and greatest SATA hard drive is a size winner worthy of your rig.

In the world of hard drives, there are two options for superior performance: faster and bigger. For speed, consumers still have the option of the 10,000 RPM Western Digital Raptor X or the 15,000 RPM SCSI Enterprise-level drives, but for size the king has been the Barracuda 7200.10 SATA hard drive since Seagate announced its production on April 26, 2006. With a maximum size of 750 GB, it’s definitely a monster, but bigger size has also meant longer latencies and shorter life as the moving parts of the drive work to find data across a bigger area.



Seagate is trying to dodge that bullet through its implementation of perpendicular recording technology, where the drive stores the magnetic information vertically instead of horizontally across the surface of the drive, reducing the number of platters needed to store data and thus reducing drive seek time. Will the new format keep Seagate in step with its competition? Or will the newest Barracuda prove to be a large mistake for the storage giant? We put the 7200.10 through its paces to find out.



Installation

Installation was simple; a couple of screws in the drive cage, a SATA cable plugged into the motherboard and then, because my motherboard only has SATA as a RAID option, some configuration with the software on the Promise RAID controller to make the drive a 0+1 RAID array. I had an existing installation of Windows XP on my old IDE drive, giving me an opportunity to test Seagate’s DiscWizard for Windows software.

The lightweight software installed quickly and easily, allowed me to choose the size of the partition(s) on the new drive (I went with one large partition) and formatted all 750 GB in a couple of seconds. Then came the cool part: did I want to set up the new drive as a backup drive, copy all of the information off the old drive and make the new drive the primary drive, or do all of that copying and wipe the old drive clean? Worried about losing my data, I chose to go with option number two and watched as the software took about 10 minutes to copy 40 GB of data from the IDE drive to the new Seagate drive. Another change in the BIOS and I was in business, with the Seagate drive running as the primary drive.

The transition went fairly smoothly, but there seem to be some lingering problems with Microsoft programs: Windows temporarily lost some icons and more importantly, Office won’t start up without an error, demanding the installation CD. Still, the transition was so quick and easy, I definitely recommend giving the DiscWizard a shot.