Category: Storage
Manufacturer: Seagate
Product: Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 750GB SATA II
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...