Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 ST31000528AS 1TB Hard Drive
7200 RPM may seem ho-hum these days, but spindles speed is not always the sole factor when it comes to performance.
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When shoppers go hunting for hard drives, the number one thing everyone looks at is the total capacity. Second item is the price. After that, it can be a whole combination of things, such as branding, spindle speed, warranty, cache, and after sales support. As important as all of these items are, it will always come back to capacity. Thankfully, there is no shortage of options and there are plenty of drives to be had. |
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From our unofficial poll, which in reality is myself walking around and asking random people in school and at work, 400GB to 500GB is the norm. Personally, I have a couple 750GB drives as I keep a lot of PVR recordings from my media center. Today, there are of course larger capacities, such as one terabyte drives such as the one we have from Seagate here today.
The Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 was their previous mainstream model for the desktop market and the model we received is the 1Tb ST31000528AS model. Keep in mind Seagate did announce their current Serial ATA 6Gbit/Second Technology product last month, but we’re still waiting for that to arrive.
The Seagate Barracuda 7200.12
Like all of their consumer drives, the Barracuda 7200.12 is a standard sized 3.5″ hard drive, with exact measurements of 4″ x 5.787″ x 1.02″ (WxLxH) and weighing in at 1.4 lbs. Below is a quick cheat sheet comparing the 7200.12 to the 7200.11 which we’ve looked at in the past:
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7200.11
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7200.12
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| Speed (RPM) |
7200
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7200
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| Cache (MB) |
16 or 32
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16 or 32
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| Platter Size (GB) |
250
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500
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To eliminate any confusion off the bat, the differences in cache has to do with the model of drive. The 1TB and 750GB models of the 7200.12 will have 32MB of cache. The 500GB and 320GB models will have 16MB of cache. Lower capacities will have 8MB. For the 1TB model, there are two 500GB platters. For the 12th generation of Barracuda, this marks both fewer platters and an increased areal density of the 1TB model.
As the name implies, the Barracuda spins its drives at 7200rpm, allowing for a sustained transfer rate of 125MB per second. Compared to their 11th generation product, this is an increase of 20MB per second. The spindle speed and increased areal density is what allows the improvement in speed. We won’t go into NCQ and other items as they have been covered with all of our recent Seagate reviews, so I invite you to take a look back there.
Test Setup
We will be testing the Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 using real-world file transfers. The test bed will be an i7 965 Extreme, MSI X58 motherboard, a OCZ Agility 120GB and 6GB of Corsair Dominator. The OS is Windows 7 RC 64-Bit, all recent updates applied. While we understand the OS isn’t final (that will be in a couple days actually), it is almost complete and should be representative of the performance you can expect out of the final version.
The Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 will be compared directly against a Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB, Western Digital Caviar Black 640GB and a Seagate 7200.11 1TB.
Along with HDTach 3.0.4.0, we will be testing small file transfer, medium file transfer and a large file transfer. Before we begin, let’s look at some HDTach performance.
Performance trending looks like what we would expect from mechanical drives. The peak performance will be in the inner platter and will dip as it moves to the outer portion of the platters. Peak performance is about 135MB/sec, with an average of 106MB/sec. CPU utilization was low, hovering around 2%.
Noise
As my computer resides on my desk, pretty much next to my head, the Seagate Barracuda is literally next to my ear. I can certainly hear the drive whenever it spins up, but it isn’t bothersome at all. Playing games or watching movies isn’t a factor at all when it comes to noise.
Small File Transfer
For the small files, we have a Doom 3 installation, with 250 files spread across a few folders and totals 1.85GB. Files will be copied from the OCZ Agility drive to the Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 (write) and after clearing the clipboard, copied from the Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 back to the Agility drive.
The WD Blue and Seagate 7200.11 trail the Seagate 7200.12 here. The WD Black is an enthusiast designed drive, so we will be expecting it to finish ahead in our tests, just as it finishes 1 second faster than the 7200.12 here.
Medium File Transfer
For the medium file, we have a Vista 64-Bit Service Pack 1 installation, which is a compressed 743 MB file. The file will be copied from the OCZ Agility drive to the Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 (write) and after clearing the clipboard, copied from the Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 back to the Agility drive.
The write speeds are close but the results are the same as the small file test in terms of winners.
Large File Transfer
For the large file, we have a Windows MCE recorded movie of Appaloosa, which is a is 3.9 GB total. The file will be copied from the OCZ Agility drive to the Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 (write) and after clearing the clipboard, copied from the Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 back to the Agility drive.
Same trend as we’ve seen earlier.
Final Words
As it stands right now, the speed differences between desktop drives are pretty much a wash using current technologies. We’re anxious to see the newer SATA 6GB parts, but the differences between the fastest and slowest drives in our tests today is about 10%. When asked to make a decision, I do tell people the first thing to consider is how much capacity do you need? Right off the bat this should make about 75% of the buying decision.
Next is reliability and warranty. With the 7200.11 drives, Seagate had taken a bit of a hit as there have been issues with the product, though the problem seemed to affect the 1.5TB drives more often. Issues of drive freezing and outright errors had been corrected with newer firmware and according to Seagate, these have been further remedied with the new 7200.12. , where most Seagate drives seem to be OEM models, Seagate does offer a 3 year warranty. On that shopping tip, for the 1TB model we reviewed, , which we think is a great price.
Solid State Drives (SSD) gets a lot of press due to the performance and other benefits, but the two big strikes going against them is price and capacity. At this time, SSD cannot touch traditional hard drives in this area. If you do have excess money, by all means, I would support a decision to pick up a SSD, but if you are more limited in funds, I would think a standard desktop drive is a better choice. I’ve used a lot of different drives over the years, and I would have no problems recommending the Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 if you’re in the market for a reliable and decent performing desktop hard drive.
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