Seagate Barracuda 750GB Review

Seagate’s massive Barracuda 7200.10 750GB hard drive is made possible by perpendicular recording and brilliant engineering. Does all the extra size detract from the performance of the drive?

Category: Storage
Manufacturer: Seagate
Product: Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 750GB SATA II
Gallery: Click Here
Price: $339.99

Seagate has been a leader in the storage world for decades. It’s no
surprise that they have been dominating this past year with release
after release of new products in the notebook, enterprise, and desktop
sectors. Back in January, they released their first venture in
perpendicular recording. The Momentus 5400.3 was the highest capacity
2.5″ hard drive at the time. Shortly thereafter, perpendicular
recording was made available to the enterprise market and now Seagate
has made a model for the consumer. This model is a mammoth hard drive
weighing in at a capacity of 750 GBs. This is the Seagate Barracuda
7200.10 750 GB Hard Drive (Model# ST3750640AS).

Specifications

Model Number: ST3750640AS
Capacity: 750 GB
Speed: 7200 RPM
Seek time: 4.16 ms avg
Cache: 16MB
Interface: SATA II (3.0 GB/s)

The specs show us that this hard drive is not only built to bring the
monstrous capacity, but to deliver from a speed aspect as well. It is
equipped to handle SATA II which is twice the transfer rate of SATA I’s
1.5 GB/s. The difference here is not in drive indexing, but rather in
the burst rate. The cache size and the seek time are right on par with
most other hard drives available. In fact, the only superiority the
150GB Raptor X has on this Barracuda is 2,500 RPMs. However, the
Barracuda is heavily equipped with some additional features.

These features include:

Perpendicular Recording
Native Command Queuing (NCQ)
Adaptive Fly Height
Clean Sweep
Directed Offline Scan
Seagate SoftSonic
Enhanced G-Force Protection

A common misconception is that bigger is always slower. In today’s
world the smaller and more sleek something is, the faster it must be.
This misconception was more than likely born from the physical realm
where things like aerodynamics and weight come into play. What needs to
be understood is that this is not the case when dealing with computer
components, more specifically, hard drives. Capacity has no effect on
the speed of the drive.

Seagate has effectively armed the 7200.10 with the latest and greatest
hard drive technologies, including perpendicular recording, native
command queuing, and the SATA II (3.0 GB/s) interface. The benefits of
perpendicular recording don’t just stop at higher capacity; when
combined with the higher areal density, it improves the overall
dynamics of the hard drive. Because there are fewer mechanical
components and it uses the more reliable method of disk writing, things
like heat, noise, and power consumption are reduced, while shock
tolerance is improved. This greatly improves the reliability of the
drive.

Seagate was kind enough to provide us with the ability to test not one,
not two, but three of these babies to prove their confidence in any
configuration. Let’s take a look at the drives…

{mospagebreak title=Hello darlings…}
My thoughts upon opening the package were mainly fantasies of a 1.5 TB
setup that I would attempt to fill with all kinds of useful stuff. Not
sure what, but I was sure it would be useful. The hard drives were
nothing spectacular to look at and I honestly didn’t expect them to be.
Aesthetically pleasing hard drives, such as the WD Raptor X, forfiet
their visual superiority in most computers because the 3.5″ bays in
most cases have little to no visibility. Needless to say, I was
satisfied with its standard shiny topped goodness.

The label provided all the information we covered on the previous page.
However, it also detailed the location and function of the jumper
switch. When they arrived, there was a jumper on the two outer-most
pins of the four pins on the back of the drive. This jumper would force
the hard drive to function in SATA I mode at 1.5 GB/s. Removing this
jumper unleashed the full power of the SATA II drives at a blazing
3.0GB/s. Keep in mind that your motherboard’s SATA controller must be
able to support SATA II. You can see the jumper’s location in the
picture below.

Installation
was simple. They were plugged in and immediately recognized by the BIOS
and reporting in at 750GBs each. Upon a fresh windows boot, they each
reported to be 698 GBs. I was amazed at the 52 GB loss considering
that’s 5x the capacity of some of the older hard drives I own. However,
I wasn’t about to complain that I only had 700 GB per drive. In addition, this falls right into line with your typical loss on smaller capacity hard drives.

{mospagebreak title=Testing}
Our philosophy since day one has been to use less synthetic benchmarks
and more simulations of what gamers will experience both in and out of
the game. In an effort to stay in line with this philosophy, we have
done both. The synthetic benchmarks will be there for you to compare
numbers with other reviews and sites across the net, and the real world
benchmarks will be there so you can get a grasp of what you will
experience when you own one or more of these hard drives.

Our test bed is composed of the following:

Case: Vigor Force
Motherboard: Abit Fatal1ty AN-9
Processor: AMD Athlon64 X2 4600+ (AM2)
RAM: Crucial Ballistix DDR2 PC2-1000
PSU: Cooler Master 650W
Video Card: Sapphire x1950 PRO
Hard Drive: 3x 750GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10

Our testing plan:

Noise Test
Temperature Testing
HD Tach Quick Bench
SiSoft SANDRA - File System Benchmark
SiSoft SANDRA - Physical Disk Benchmark - READ test
Map load - Far Cry
Map load - Battlefield 2

These tests will be run completely in SATA II (3.0 GB/s) mode and in
three different configurations: single disk, 2 disks in RAID-0, and
then all three disks in a RAID-5 configuration. The only tests that
will not be done in all three configurations is the noise and
temperature tests. This is simply for the fact that these will remain
roughly identical in any configuration. That being said, let’s dive
into those tests immediately.

Noise Test

Hard drive noise is one of the more irritating noises a computer can
make. It is sporadic and there is a complete lack of rhythm.
Unfortunately, I do not have a decibel meter handy, but I can say this.
These hard drives were barely audible at full load outside the case,
and were inaudible once inside. I hate the sound of a hard drive’s
erratic behavior. It was a pleasure to see such a powerhouse be so
quiet.

Thermal Testing
I may not have have a decibel meter on hand, but I do have a infrared
thermometer handy for taking temperatures of completely arbritray
things around the house. However, I have finally put it to good use.
Now, in an effort to stress the hard drives, I had to run an excess of
programs that would access them constantly. Thus, I transfered over 250
GB of data on and then off again while running HD Tach Long Benchmarks
in loop, and installing and uninstalling Battlefield 2. I did this for
a period of 2 hours while typing on my laptop. During this time I
occasionally grabbed the temp from various locations on the hard
drives. This averaged out to 37C, but the bottom of the hard drives was
always hotter and was consistently averaging 42C. This is actually a
decent temperature for hard drives to run at. So, I unfortunately will
not be able to substitute these in for space heaters in preparation for
the cold Chicago winter I will soon be facing.

From a noise and temperature standpoint, these hard drives passed the
tests and performed well. However, noise and temperature aren’t going
to help gain back all that time wasted loading huge maps and waiting
for file transfers. Thus, we needed to see how gamers could benefit
from these ungodly large hard drives.

{mospagebreak title=The True Tests Begin}

It was time to begin the punishment. Three different configurations.
Five tests in all to be performed on each of these configurations. I
began with HD Tach’s Quick Bench. For these tests, I used HD Tach version 3.0.1.0 running the quick
bench. The HD Tach benchmarking tool was used because it can provide
several key values such as CPU usage, access time, average read, and
the burst speed. Things you want to look for are lower values in CPU
usage and access time, and higher values for the burst speed and and
average read speed. You will see the three configurations of the
Barracudas and an average 80GB SATA HD for comparison purposes.

It’s clear to see that the Barracudas are faster, more sophisticated
hard drives. They also form a Healthy RAID that can perform very well.
The Non-RAID HD shows some great numbers as well, which are only more
exemplified in the RAID-0 and RAID-5 setups. These hard drives could be
capable of preparing a 5 course meal, but they won’t capture a gamer’s
interest without putting up some nice performance numbers. Granted this
is a static benchmark of which we have one more, but it is a good
quantitative measurement of areas you otherwise wouldn’t be able to see
numbers for.

SiSoft’s Sandra allows us to measure some aspects that HD Tach
leaves out, including buffered write and read speeds. Unfortunately, I
just noticed this graph’s drives are in a different order than the rest
so pay closer attention. The access time is near double that of the
ordinary SATA drive, but remains steady through the RAID
configurations. However, not only do the Barracudas outperform the
ordinary SATA drive, they show true power in the RAID-0 configuration
as well. RAID-0 dominates in both read and write speeds, with RAID-5
not too far behind.

{mospagebreak title=Map Load Tests}

I chose Battlefield 2 simply for its legendary map loading times.
‘Strike at Karkand’ seems to be one of the heavier maps and, thus, was
chosen for this test. Again, the Barracudas destroy the ordinary drive.
However, there is not much of gain as far as the different RAID
configurations. I find this interesting as map loading is where we
should see the most significant gain in gameplay from these hard
drives. By themselves, they smoke ordinary drives, but there is minimal
gain from the RAID configurations.

FarCry
is another game that has been heralded as having long map loads.
Significant gains in times are shown by the data. There is even a
decent gain in the RAID-0 and RAID-5 configurations. In fact, the
RAID-0 and RAID-5 setups more than halve the time it took to load the
maps on the ordinary 80GB drive. Very impressive. Why there was no gain
in BF2 between the RAID setups and there was in FarCry is up for
speculation. Obviously there is a difference in the games as it relates
to map loading, but that difference is unknown.

{mospagebreak title=Conclusion}

Well, its not hard to see that Seagate has always, and continues to,
mean business. These hard drives not only delivered on a capacity
level, but also on a performance level. The majority of gamer’s aren’t
only at their computer for gaming. We are constantly in need of higher
capacities whether for game demos, match demos, player videos, music,
movies, game installs and so much more. However, we need the higher
capacity drives to be able to perform, as well. Seagate understands
this need for both capacity and performance, and it is evident in the
7200.10 series. While the price may seem high, we should take a moment
to break it down. The lowest price on PriceGrabber is $339.99 USD,
which breaks down to around $0.48 USD per GB. Without factoring in the
performance, that is an outstanding price, but when you DO factor in
the performance it becomes a steal. I know its hard to see that because
of the price, but you have to factor in both the performance and the
fact it is 3/4 of a Terabyte. My concern would be how to backup such a
large capacity drive. If calculated at the formatted capacity of 698GB,
it would take 148 single layer DVDs to back up this hard drive when
full. Because of this, it is my recommendation to run a RAID-1 or a
RAID-5 configuration, so as to have complete redundancy. While I have
faith in the reliability of these hard drives, you really never know
what can happen and with 750GB you could very well store your entire
digital existence on it.

Pros
+ Industry leading capacity
+ outstanding performance
+ amazing ‘price per gig’
+ perpendicular recording and all its glorious benefits
+ comes with a 5 year warranty

Cons
- None

Rating
10 out of 10

This line of hard drives has an incredible capacity
coupled with solid performance numbers. They are in top flight compared
to all their competitors and I am very impressed by this product. I
would recommend these hard drives to anyone who not only needs
performance, but wants to enjoy having a considerable amount of
storage.

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