Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5 Terabyte Review

Introduction:

You really have to wonder when the need for hard drive space began to start skyrocketing. Although I got into this hobby/addiction later than some, I remember my first hard drive being in the realm of 500 megabytes. Coupled up with my 486 DX2 processor, I had a state of the art rig for the time, or so I thought. That time has long since gone the way of the dinosaurs. Fast forward to 2008. With all of the digital media content available to us in the form of pictures, home videos, music and more, there has to be a means to store our now digitized lives. Hard drive manufacturers have answered the calls for more "space" by steadily increasing the drive capacities to the point where we now have drives with 1.5 Terabytes of storage space. 1.5 Terabytes of space. Do you really know how much this is? To put this in perspective, that is 1,500 gigabytes or 1,500,000 megabytes. Every one of those MP3 files you have range in the 2 to 4MB range, each picture depending on your digital camera be up to 6MB. So how many of each does it take to fill this drive up? Quite a few.

The Seagate 1.5 Terabyte drive is the largest drive in its class and features a 7200RPM spindle speed, 32MB cache and the now proven perpendicular magnetic recording technology. Additionally, this drive in an idle state consumes up to 43 percent less power than previous generations of this Seagate hard drive. Add in the five year warranty and it looks like one heck of a product. Let's see if the 1.5 Terabyte Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 performs as well as or better than the last Seagate Drive tested here on OCC.

Closer Look:

The external view is not much different from one hard drive to the next. Pretty much an aluminum and steel enclosure that protects the platters and mechanisms inside from both the elements and any significant jolts.

The Seagate 1.5 Terabyte drive uses an SATA interface to receive and deliver data. There is a jumper block if you need to limit the speed of the drive to a 1.5 GB/s transfer rate, mainly on older technology motherboards

Now let's see what it's got under the hood!