Tested: Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1-terabyte hard drive

By Rory Reid on 02 November 2007, 4:59pm

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Performance
The 7200.11 isn't designed simply to be a massive dustbin for your digital crap -- it's purportedly quite quick, too. Nobody's ever going to get excited about a 7,200rpm spindle speed (10,000rpm is usually required to get our juices flowing) but the 32MB of cache memory provided helps performance by giving fast access to temporary files.

The 7200.11 also uses native command queuing (NCQ), which can improve disk access speeds under certain situations. The drive can internally optimise the order in which received read and write commands are executed. This can reduce the amount of unnecessary toing and froing by the drive's heads, making it operate faster, and potentially reducing wear and tear. It's ideally used in servers due to the almost random nature in which files are requested in those environments, but can unfortunately be a hindrance in games, or applications where sequential reading and writing is most common.

We tested the 7200.1 using the hard drive benchmark component of PC Mark 2005, where it scored 5,802. This is a middle-of-the-road score in our experience -- we don't normally get out of bed for drives that score less than 6,500, but we'll forgive it this indiscretion because it's just so huge.

But how do they make it so big? Let's find out.