Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB Hard Disk

Performance Analysis

Performance of Seagate’s 1.5TB Barracuda 7200.11 is something of a mixed bag, although it’s clear that there have been improvements across the board in comparison to Seagate’s 1TB drive. The cache issues have been resolved to clear effect, and read, write, and copy speeds have increased across the board.

In comparison to Samsung’s brilliant Spinpoint F1 1TB hard disk, things get a little more complicated though. While the increased platter size results in a boost to write speeds across the board, the Barracuda’s slower response time means reading or read/writing large batches of small files is noticeably slower.

However, switch to larger file based tasks where response time isn’t so important and read, copy and write speeds are fantastic, and are healthily ahead of the competition thanks to the four beefy 375GB platters providing unmatched platter density in a drive this size.

The slower response times have a knock on effect elsewhere too, and the improved platter density is unable to compensate to a significant enough degree to pull the Vista boot and Crysis load times ahead of the Samsung. While the Barracuda 1.5TB is a very quick mechanical drive in its own right and frequently outpaces lower capacity drives like the previous generation of Western Digital 10,00RPM disks for small file intensive tasks, it loses out to the nippier Samsung and this makes it less of an attractive proposition for use as a boot drive.

What the Seagate 1.5TB drive is perfect for though is storing large files like ISO or video rips of your DVD collection or raw uncompressed video footage. When dealing with these files access time is less important and the advantage of the larger platters is much more apparent. It’s a big fat drive that’s perfect for the biggest fattest files.

Value and Final Thoughts

Currently available for around £111.54, this is an unquestionably pricey drive, although not ridiculously so. In fact, in comparison to the Samsung F1 1TB we favour here at bit-tech, it’s only fifty percent more expensive, which seems very fair considering you’re getting fifty percent more storage into the bargain.

For those with limited storage space running a media centre or small form factor system this certainly seems like the better option, especially when you consider that such setups are usually used for storing large video files, which the Barracuda 1.5TB is perfect for.

Noise wise it’s just as quiet as the previous Seagate and the Samsung 1TB drives, although the use of four platters rather than three does make it a little hotter than the Samsung, although not enough to cause any real concern – the Seagate 1.5TB is rated to run at temperatures up to 60°C, which you’d have to have a pretty poor cooling setup in your case to be approaching.

While an unquestionably good hard disk in its own right, and a big improvement over Seagate’s previous quad platter 1TB drive in every respect, the response time and subsequent effect on read/copy tasks involving large numbers of small files in comparison to the Samsung stops the Seagate Barracuda 1.5TB from taking the crown of top desktop mechanical hard drive tested to date. For use as a boot or game storage the Samsung is still the superior disk, but if you’re after more storage in a single drive for your media centre or looking to store a ton of larger files, then it's still a superb choice.

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Score Guide