Seagate has a lot of titles under their belt, but the first company to produce a 1 Terabyte hard drive isn't one of them. Regardless of who came in first, the only thing that matters is who is best and Seagate has proven to the world time and time again that they are the company that sets the standards in data storage. Seagate's newest hard drive, the 1 Terabyte Barracuda 7200.11 was a little late getting out the gate, but it's here now and ready to roll. Sometimes not being first has it's advantages, so now the question is: "do the people over at Seagate have a superior hard drive?" Sometimes this question can be answered without ever testing a single hard drive. Sometimes all you have to do is ask the question; "Who believes in their product the most?". With the Barracuda 7200.11 hard drives coming with an incredible 5 year warranty and the best RMA program I have ever seen, this question has already been answered. But just in case you were wondering how the new 7200.11 hard drives performed, let's test a couple and find out!

     I'd like to mention that Seagate has been a long time sponsor and I've come to know them extremely well. It says a lot about a company when the same person you've been dealing with since 2003 is still happily working at Seagate. I can't say the same for most of the companies I've worked with over the years. It seems like most public relations offices rotate their people out every 6 months whether they need to or not. In a corporate world with little or no job security, it's nice to talk to someone who's been around long enough to actually know their job and the detailed history of their product.

     The particular hard drives we have before us today are a pair of Serial ATA, 1 Terabyte, Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 drives carrying a model number of ST31000340AS.  From an external view, there really isn't much to talk about. Most hard drive look pretty much the same, but it's the quality of parts on the inside that really make the difference.

Key Advantages

     Having 1 Terabyte of storage has many advantages, one of them is the low cost of ownership. 5 years ago I never believed I would see a 1 Terabyte hard drive. I often dreamed of having a server running RAID with a 1Tb storage capacity, but I never thought I'd see that much space in a single drive, especially for only a few hundred bucks. The key advantages are:

• Designed with four disks to provide the optimal balance of advanced technology and low total cost of ownership
• Eleventh-generation drive in the successful, award-winning Barracuda® product family
• Enables up to 1 TB of storage capacity (other capacities at 500 GB and 750 GB)
• Industry’s most reliable hard drive with proven second-generation perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology
• Leverages best combination of technology (areal density, PMR) and proven components for volume shipping
• Industry-leading acoustics and power consumption levels
• 105-MB/s sustained data rate
• 32-MB cache

Best-Fit Applications

     We've all dreamed of having huge amounts of data storage, regardless if we need it or not. But in today's multimedia world, we need all the storage space we can get. 1Tb hard drives are ideal for: 

• Workstations
• Desktop RAID
• Gamer PCs
• High-end PCs
• Mainstream PCs
• USB/FireWire/eSATA personal external storage

7200.11 Specifications

* One gigabyte, or GB, equals one billion bytes and one terabyte, or TB, equals one trillion bytes when referring to hard drive capacity.

† Not available through distribution

‡ Quiet seek specification