Desktop hard drives are pushed by two main factors, performance and capacity. End users want to cram as much data as possible onto a single drive, but also need data transfers and drive access to be lightning fast. This is a difficult dual-requirement for any hardware vendor, but when you add a low price into the equation, it gets that much tougher.
So far, Seagate has delivered with each new revision of its popular Barracuda hard drive line, and the 7200.11 represents the latest flagship design, with capacities up to a full terabyte. That's where we're heading today, for the top-of-the-line Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1TB, to see if it continues the Barracuda tradition into the eleventh generation.
The Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1TB hard drive offers all the standard features that hardware enthusiasts demand. These include a 7200-RPM spindle speed, an average latency of 4.16 ms, SATA 3.0 Gb/s support, a MTBF of 750,000 hours, and an SATA NCQ interface. The onboard cache has been upgraded from the 16MB of the top 7200.10 drives, to a full 32MB for the 500GB, 750GB and 1TB 7200.11 models, while the 320GB drive falls back to 16MB.
Data capacity is naturally a full 1TB, matching the top desktop hard drives on the market. To achieve this, the platter size of the Barracuda 7200.11 has increased to 250GB, up from the 188GB used in the 7200.10 series. Obviously, this equates into a 4-platter design, with a very easy transition to the 500GB and 750GB densities. Seagate lists the random read seek time at <8.5 msec and the random write seek time a bit higher at <9.5 msec, with the latter being a bit faster than the 7200.10 generation.
Power usage specifications are also good, with an 11.6W seek, 12.0W operating and 8.0W idle averages, all of which are improvements over the Barracuda 7200.10 generation. The maximum start current of 3.0 amps of the 7200.11 drives is slightly higher than the 2.8 amps of the previous generation. Surprisingly, the Barracuda 7200.11 1TB weighs only 677 grams, which is lighter than the 720 grams of the 7200.10 750GB drive.
The overall design of the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1TB hard drive is standard, and virtually identical to the various Barracuda 7200.9 and 7200.10 models. The drive back plate includes Serial ATA power and data connectors, along with the jumper arrangement, and the top of the drive housing is silver with the Seagate model number and specifications.
The only issue we had is with Seagate's decision to set the jumpers to SATA 1.5 Gb/s mode by default. While backward compatibility is important, end users who do not notice the jumper setting will receive much lower burst mode performance on SATA 3.0 Gb/s platforms. Other drive manufacturers like Western Digital set the jumpers to SATA 3.0 Gb/s mode by default, and it's time that Seagate joins the crowd.
The drive also offers features such as Second-Generation Perpendicular Recording (increased areal density). Adaptive Fly Height (more consistent read/write performance, Clean Sweep (automatic drive calibration), and the Seagate SoftSonic motor (for ultra-quiet Operation), while meeting RoHS requirements.
The Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1TB is a high-capacity performance hard drive, and we've matched it up with comparable reference hardware. The first step is insuring NCQ and SATA 3.0 Gb/s support at the motherboard level, and this requirement is covered off by using the high-end AMD 790FX chipset, outfitted with a powerful HT 3.0 architecture. This platform easily supported and identified all the SATA 3.0 Gb/s and 1.5 Gb/s drives.
The reference processor is the 2.6 GHz Phenom 9900, which allows true quad core multi-threading, and is more than powerful enough for high-end disk testing. The ASUS M3A32-MVP Deluxe is the specific platform used, while the remainder of our reference system consists of 2 x 1GB Ultra DDDR2-800 (CAS4), a PNY GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB graphics card, and a Enermax EG651P-VE-24P 550W EPS12V power supply, all running Windows Vista Ultimate.
The set of reference SATA hard drives offer different formats and designs, and give us a well-rounded selection of comparison models. In addition to the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1TB (ST31000340AS) drive, we have the Western Digital Caviar SE16 750GB (WD7500AAKS), Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 750GB (ST3750640AS), Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 500GB (ST3500641AS), Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 400GB (ST3400832AS), and Maxtor MaxLine III 250 GB (7B250S0) hard drives ready for benchmarking.
The benchmark list includes a range of hard drive specific tests, including PCMark05 Pro, PCMark Vantage, HD Tune, SiSoft SANDRA XII 2008, and HD Speed. These provide a nice overview of hard drive performance, and cover off read, write and seek time performance ratings, as well as some other important data like drive temperatures and CPU usage.
* Please note that unless otherwise stated, all performance graph results equate to the standard "higher is better" routine.
The PCMark05 Pro suite includes a hard disk performance component, which is separated into different test segments relative to actual real-world demands. The test formats have been created from real-world usage patterns, and include varying degrees of heavy read, write and seek requirements. For this review, we have chosen the Windows XP Startup, General Usage, File Write, and Virus Scan tests, all of which are presented in a MB/sec. format.
The Windows XP Startup tests attempt to duplicate the startup routine of Windows XP, and emulates the conditions present when the operating system loads. The Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1TB shows high performance next to the 500GB and 750GB Seagate Barracuda hard drives, but it falls behind the Western Digital 750GB model.
The General Usage disk benchmark offers up a wide range of individual tests, from opening a document to compressing an image to playing media files, and even includes some game-related program loads as well. This test certainly lives up to its name, and is almost an even balance between disk reads and writes. The Seagate 7200.11 1TB drive again finds itself slightly behind the WD 750GB model, although it does post the second best score.
The File Write benchmark provides us with another piece of the hard disk puzzle, and is a test comprised entirely of disk write operations. In this case, the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1TB redeems itself a bit with a convincing victory in the very important file writing tests, and posts a score well in front of both the Seagate and WD 750GB drives.
Our last chart is for the Virus Scan benchmark, which is primarily a disk reading test, and consists of scanning 600MB of files for viruses. The Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1TB again proves to be a very high-end performer, outpacing the Seagate and WD 750GB hard drives by a wide margin.
PCMark Vantage is the latest revision of the popular benchmark family, and it follows along with PCMark05 by offering a specific HDD benchmark suite. These represent real-world usage patterns, often featuring standard applications and functions. There any many different tests, and we have selected four of these for our review: Gaming, Import Images, Vista Startup, and Video Editing.
The PCMark Vantage Gaming HDD test measures the hard drive performance when streaming data using the Alan Wake game from Remedy. This is 99.95% a disk read benchmark. Here, the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1TB hard drive proves to be the fastest performer, something that rates for high for a hardcore gaming-oriented site, just sliding ahead of the Western Digital 750GB drive.
The Import Images disk benchmark measures the hard drive performance while importing a large collection of images to Windows Photo Gallery. While primarily a disk read test, this does include over 15% write operations. It's another very close race in this benchmark, but the Barracuda 7200.11 1TB drive finally pulls out a very slim victory.
The Windows Vista Startup HDD benchmark measures the drive performance while loading Windows Vista Ultimate. This is similar to the previous test, with an 85/15 disk read/write breakdown. The Windows Vista Startup results are different from the older Windows XP ones, and now find the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1TB as the top performance option.
Our final PCMark Vantage HDD test is the Video Editing benchmark. This measures concurrent hard drive performance while using Windows Movie Maker for a variety of video editing tasks. This is a very good PCMark Vantage disk test, and features almost an even split between read/write operations. The Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1TB cannot make it a clean sweep in the Vantage testing, and falls down to second place in this test.
HD Tune is a very popular hard drive benchmark that not only offers standard benchmark testing, but also provides detailed information on a drive's specifications and features, while also measuring things like CPU Usage and Drive Temperature. In this review, we have provided results for the following tests: Burst Rate (MB/sec.), Average Transfer Rate (MB/sec.), Random Access (ms), CPU Usage (%), and Drive Temperature (degrees C).
The Burst Rate benchmark results really highlight the difference between the older SATA 1.5 Gb/s drives and those with the newer SATA 3.0 Gb/s interface. Not only that, but the burst rate scores show the Seagate Barracuda 3.0 Gb/s drives with a noticeable advantage over the Western Digital model. We made sure the correct jumper was activated on the WD drive, and it does show higher performance than the older SATA 1.5 Gb/s models.
HD Tune also provides an Average Transfer Rate benchmark, which gives a score in the usual MB/sec. format. The Seagate 7200.11 1TB drive again proves to be a very able performer, taking first place in the benchmark, and is the only drive to exceed an 80 MB/sec. transfer rate.
The Random Access testing gets a bit more detailed, as it highlights the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1TB as the fastest at 12.5ms, and is the only drive to drop below the 13ms mark.
HD Tune also offers a Drive Temperature reading, which we took after the entire triple-run HD Tune benchmarking was complete. We tested each of the hard drives in the same position in the cage, and at this point, the temperature readings were very consistent. While all the hard drives are sitting above 40 degrees C, the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1TB is right in there with the rest of the performance models.
There is also a CPU Utilization portion to the HD Tune suite, and although SATA drives offer a very limited drain on CPU resources (all of our drives were under 2% at load), we though we'd post the data anyway.
HD Speed is a benchmark that measures both sustained and burst data transfer rates of various storage devices, including hard disks. It presents the overall hard disk transfer rates in a graphic format, as well as a numerical average. The test block size is also user-definable up to a maximum of 16MB, and the benchmark run time is configurable. For this test, we have run HD Speed using the default block size for both Burst Mode and Average Read benchmarks. Each test is performed for 3 minutes, with the average Burst Mode and Read Data Transfer rate presented in graph format.
The HD Speed Burst Mode benchmarking again shows the Seagate Barracuda drives with a noticeable performance advantage compared to the Western Digital 750GB. At least this time, the WD drive makes a far better showing, and easily demonstrates it is in SATA 3.0 Gb/s mode, staying well ahead of our SATA 1.5 Gb/s models.
The Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1TB drive has another very nice showing in the Average Read test, and notice how the two newer models have significantly higher performance in this benchmark.
SiSoft SANDRA XII 2008 includes a File System benchmark that combines the read/write (buffered, random, sequential) and seek time tests into once easy-to-digest number. This is a composite figure representing the overall drive performance based on the average of the read and write tests. We are also including the Access Time results, which measure the random access times (in ms) of the benchmarked hard drives.
Due to differing test scenarios, the SiSoft SANDRA XII 2008 File System benchmark might not yield the exact same numbers, but the overall rankings stay very consistent. Once again, the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1TB finishes with the top score, followed by the Western Digital 750GB hard drive. Both are also nicely ahead of the other older performance hard drives, showing that even at the same capacity, newer models are usually faster.
The Access Time scores show a natural progression from the more entry-level drives, to the top-of-the-line models. The Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1TB drive places at the top of the chart with a 13ms rating, but it is tied with two other models.
The overall benchmark results confirm that both the larger platter size and greater 32MB data cache help the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1TB easily outpace the 7200.10 generation, and take the top performance slot in this review. The latest and largest Seagate drive does not put in a world-beating performance, but it does provide an incremental advance, while offering a full 1TB of data capacity. The burst mode and data transfer results are extremely good, and the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1TB drive keeps its access times low and temperature within check.
Overall performance was excellent, and the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1TB drive did extremely well in the real-world evaluation. Thermal heat was average for its class, and the drive was silent through most of the testing. It exhibited no drive whine or undue vibration, and its seek noise was noticeably lower compared to some of the other drives. Overall, the 1TB Seagate hard drive impressed on all levels, and looks to be another very good bet for high-performance users.
Seagate hard drives are usually priced very competitively, but lately there has been a slight premium associated with the Barracuda name. Part of this is due to the brand loyalty that Seagate has developed over the years, but the longer product warranty has also had an effect. The Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1TB is currently priced at $235-$240, which compares to the Western Digital Caviar GP 1TB ($220), Samsung SpinPoint F1 1TB ($250), Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 1TB ($260), and Western Digital Caviar RE2 GP 1TB ($280) drives.
The "sweet spot" for SATA drives still exists at the 750GB range, but for those looking at a full 1TB, this is actually very competitive for a Seagate drive, especially considering the top-end specifications and high-end performance. Seagate also offers a 5-year warranty on their OEM drives, which compares the standard 3-year warranty offered by the other large manufacturers like Western Digital, Maxtor, Samsung and Hitachi on their consumer-level OEM drives, although WD does match the 5-year warranty on its Raptor and RAID Edition lines.
* Please note that these prices were taken at the time of review and are not meant to reflect long-term trends.
The Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1TB hard drive offers a prime upgrade in terms of both performance and data capacity, while maintaining the quality and warranty that has made Seagate such a popular brand. It's not a quantum leap, but the upgrade to 32MB of onboard cache and a full terabyte of disk capacity does make for a nice evolutionary step up. The drive is quiet, fast and huge, and is actually one of the lowest-cost 1TB models, but it's time for Seagate to get with the times and switch the jumper to 3.0 Gb/s by default.
