Seagate’s 7200.11 series is essentially the Rolls Royce of high-capacity consumer 3.5 inch internal hard drives. The capacity is as good as anything else available, and the speed exceeds that of drives with similar size. In the world of consumer PC hard drives, there are really two categories: low-capacity, high-speed drives, and high-capacity, low-speed drives. Occasionally you’ll find a high-speed drive with larger capacity, and you’ll also occasionally find high-capacity drives with higher speeds. This drive is the latter. Seagate was generous enough to send me their highest-end model to review, the one terabyte 7200.11 Barracuda.
First things first, we have to look at the capacity. There aren’t a lot of internal terabyte hard drives on the market today, and if you’re buying this drive, the capacity is most likely the main draw. When formatted as NTFS, you’re left with 931GB of usable space. It’s certainly nice to be able to download and install as much as I want without having to worry much about hard drive space. Usually the downside to cutting-edge capacity is low speed. When compact flash microdrives came out, they were revolutionary in terms of storage, but were slow, and used more battery power. When new hard drives are developed, they are generally slower due to the higher number of platters, and due to the smaller ridges on the disks themselves. Seagate has counter-acted this by implementing new features to increase speed and reliability. For example, the 7200.11 series has a feature called perpendicular recording. According to eetimes.com, Perpendicular recording is capable of delivering more than triple the storage density of traditional longitudinal recording. So in fewer platter rotations, the drive can read or write MORE data.
Comparatively, the Barracuda 7200.11 1TB has an average latency time of 4.16ms, whereas Western Digital’s 1TB drive, the Caviar, has an average seek time of 5.6ms, putting the Barracuda about thirty-five percent faster, which is significant. But not only is the Barracuda faster than Western Digital’s drive, but it actually has the fastest seek time of any terabyte hard drive on Newegg.com.
I compared Seagate’s Barracuda to Western Digital’s Caviar using HD Tune v2.53, which determines each drive’s transfer rates and access times. The Barracuda had an average transfer speed of 84.5MB/s, whereas the Caviar had an average speed of just 59.2MB/s. That’s a very significant difference for two drives of the same size, RPM, and interface. Fact is, this drive is the best at everything it is. Industry-leading capacity with industry-leading speed for 7200RPM drives. The only downside for this drive at the current time is price, putting this drive at over $230. In comparison, two Barracudas at 500GB each would cost as little as $190 total (granted they’d use more power and space). But as it always goes, the prices will continue to drop, so this is only a temporary problem. Overall, however, this applies to all drives of this capacity. The Western Digital Caviar is the same price, and as I’ve explained, has much lower performance. If you are looking to buy a high capacity drive for your PC, Seagate’s Barracuda is leading the way in capacity, innovation, and performance.
