Seagate was surprisingly late to join the small, but elite club of storage manufacturers shipping one terabyte (1TB) class hard drives. Somewhat expectedly, the first out of the gate was Hitachi, who made it to market several months beforehand with a high-density five-platter 1TB hard disk design. While Hitachi’s performance, thermals, and acoustics have all been tested to be fairly solid overall, many high-end buyers have been waiting for other large manufacturers, namely Western Digital and Seagate, to get into the game to see how these other products compare. Now, all of the major disk manufacturers are shipping terabyte-class products, so we should start to see overall prices fall soon, as these guys start to look at what the next step beyond 1TB will be.
Seagate’s Barracuda 7200.11 drive has been on the radar for quite some time, and as of now, it appears to be shipping in volume. The 7200.11 family (named as the 11th-generation of 7,200 RPM hard disks) allows for storage capacities up to 1000GB/1TB and cache sizes up to a whopping 32 MB, along with the latest Seagate generation of technologies for fine-tuned performance and acoustics. Seagate has kindly provided their new flagship desktop drive to us for a round of testing against some similarly classed hard drive designs. Let’s get started.
