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 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.
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