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An In-Depth Look At Seagate's 1.5TB Barracuda

Posted by kdawson on from the should-be-space-enough-for-anyone dept.

theraindog writes "More than a year and a half after the first terabyte hard drives became widely available, Seagate has reached the next storage capacity milestone. With 1.5 terabytes, the latest Barracuda 7200.11 serves up 50% more capacity than its peers, and at a surprisingly affordable $0.12 per gigabyte. But Seagate's decision to drop new platters into an old Barracuda shell may not have been a wise one. The Tech Report's in-depth review of the world's first 1.5TB hard drive shows that while the latest 'cuda is screaming fast in synthetic throughput drag races, poor real world write speeds ultimately tarnish its appeal."

3 of 283 comments (clear)

  1. But they didn't even do 1T right... by pseudorand · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Has anyone else noticed that a large number of the Seagate 1T drives fail on you in 30 days. The same is true for samsung and WD. Even with the Hitachis I get 1/5 failed out of the box. I still buy all Hitachis though, because the ones that do work keep working. Why are we moving to 1.5T when the 1T are too buggy to be useful. (BTW, my epxerience is based on buying 100+ drives).

    1. Re:But they didn't even do 1T right... by greg1104 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      If you take a look at the newegg reviews, you'll find 16% of them give the 1TB 7200.11 drive a 1 star review, most of which are because of DOA or D shortly after A. So it's not just you who noticed.

      Seagate's Barracuda line had a good run with high reliability for quite a while. If you check the reliability database at storagereview (unfortunately you have to go through some trouble to become a member and see the data), the Barracuda ATA III, IV, and V are ranked near the top--92, 90, and 96th percentile respectively. Then things went way downhile--7200.7 hits 88, the 7200.8 at 49, and the 7200.9 at 43. That matches my own anecdotal experience.

      Sometime after the 750GB drives came out reliability took a further dive south. I believe that was caused by switching a large amount of production to a new plant in Thailand (the reliable models came out of Singapore). That seems to be the inevitable way hard drive manufacturing works--whenever some company moves to a new facility, quality dives for a few years afterward. I predict that 5 or 10 years from now talk will be about how reliable the old Thai drives were compared to the new junk coming out of [new country of origin].

  2. Re:Capacity is hardly news anymore by Pentium100 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I have a very old Seagate drive (well, it says Seagate ST41200N on the top, but windows recognizes it as Imprimis 94601-15). It is a 1.2GB (991MB) 5.25" full height drive and it works perfectly. I have another one, a bit younger (ST34520N) ~4GB, it also works very well. All the new ones also work well, so when I buy a hard drive, I buy Seagate.

    I wonder why nobody is making 5.25" hard drives anymore... With current technology they could have at least 10TB capacity...