Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3160815AS 160GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive
What can I really say? It’s a Hard Drive under $50 and double the capacity of the two 80gig HDD’s I have in right now. Funny thing is I have my main Operating System on a Western Digital Raptor 74gig 10,000 RPM Hard Drive, and the output of this drive is the same as the Raptor. The only advantage the WD Raptor has over this drive is faster seek times… which matters more for database driven systems and the like, not a huge difference for desktop applications… kinda makes me wonder why I paid $150 back in the day for the WD Raptor in the first place.
Oh well, I’m not complaining about either. I have the Operating System, a few small programs, and games installed on the WD, larger programs, and a storage dump on the Seagate, music, and media files on the other drive. My computer starts up quick enough (with most start-up programs coming from two sources), and does what I want it to. I’m testing out the Seagate to see about later this year getting three more and putting four of them in RAID 5EE for ultra fast transfer speeds (also with a RAID controller that gives me a dedicated 500mhz processor for the Hard Drive, and 256mb DDR2 of dedicated Hard Drive cache)
Stats for both the Western Digital Raptor, and Seagate Barracuda:
HD Tune Benchmark WD Raptor
I thought the spike or drop in performance in the middle of the drive may have been a fluke, but I’ve tested it many times, it does the same thing every time. Even with other hard drive benching software.
Seagate Barracuda 160GB HDD
The Seagate does not have as “straight” of a line across as the Raptor, but it has a much higher maximum output speed, no degrading performance spike in the middle, and a much higher capacity. The higher capacity could be to blame for the sharp decline in performance towards the end of the drive.
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Another advantage of the Raptor that I just noticed is that it runs about 6 degrees Celsius cooler. Which is odd… but then again it has built in fins, and I’ve got a lot of fans in my comp, so the airflow is more advantageous to the one with a better heat sink.