HDTach results

Website: HD Tach 3.0


The Seagate 7200.12 's burst speed isn't fantastic but it's by no means terrible, and is a big step up from the burst speed of the previous generation Seagate 1TB 7200.11 hard disk. Still, it's 10MB/s off the burst speed of the Samsung and strangely is 24MB/s off the burst speed of the 1.5TB Seagate 7200.11 drive, a performance gap caused either by the use of a different cache chip or revised firmware.


Looking at the average read speed across the drive it's clear to see that the increased areal density from the use of just two 500GB platters has had an effect on the drive's performance, with the Seagate 7200.12 1TB a full 15MB/s faster than the previous generation and similarly quicker than Samsung's Spinpoint F1 1TB -impressive stuff!


Write performance is also good and is again a big improvement over the Seagate 7200.11 1TB drive, although it's notably slower than the triple plattered Samsung by roughly 5MB/s. That might not sound like much but when you're writing large amounts of data to a drive, such as when backup up large batches of files, these small differences magnify.


Interestingly hard disk drive manufacturers rarely quote random access times, instead preferring to list the more misleading "response time," figures. Again we're dealing with seemingly small differences, but these are easily magnified when when a drive is accessing literally thousands of files in a single job. While the Seagate 7200.12 1TB drive is certainly no slouch it's disappointingly slower than the previous generation of Seagate drives - likely a trade off from updating the read/write heads to be able to read data packed so tightly into those 500GB platters.

While theoretical performance has it's ups and downs, with especially good average read times, it's important to remember that these are only theoretical results - we'll have to look to our real world testing to get a better idea of the Seagate 7200.12's true performance.