Seagate has been busy lately; offering a variety of new products to bolster their line up of desktop, notebook, and enterprise class hard drives. One of the more interesting development hard drive technology came back in January when Seagate launched the Momentus 5400.3 series of notebook hard drives, their first to use perpendicular recording technology. A few months later that technology made its way to the enterprise market, and now they are offering it in a desktop drive, the Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 (Model Number ST3750640AS).
The Barracuda 7200.10 offers a variety of impressive features and we are anxious to cover them in this review. The first things that will jump out at people is the massive capacity... 750 GB of storage on one disk! It seems that just a few short years ago, having a drive with 1/10 that capacity was considered alot. Seagate raised the bar to 500 GB with the Barracuda 7200.9 about 6 months ago, and with the release of the 7200.10 it is clear that perpendicular recording technology will be implemented to keep the capacities climbing.
The list of specifications and features below was compiled from the Seagate and Newegg websites, and shows what you get in addition to the 750 GB capacity.
Specifications:
» Model Number: ST3750640AS
» Capacity: 750 GB
» Speed: 7200 rpm
» Seek time: 4.16 ms avg
» Cache: 16MB
» Interface: SATA 3Gb/s
» Warranty: 5 Year
Features:
» Native Command Queuing
» Perpendicular Recording
» Adaptive Fly Height
» Clean Sweep
» Directed Offline Scan
» Seagate SoftSonic
» Enhanced G-Force Protection
From the lists above we can see that the 7200.10 combines all of the latest drive technologies into one impressive package. In addition to the highest capacity available, you have the extremely fast SATA 3 Gbps interface, Native Command Queuing, and all of the benefits of perpendicular recording technology. In addition to greater capacities, perpendicular recording technology and increased areal density improve the overall dynamics of the drive. Features associated with reliability (shock tolerance, power consumption, noise, and heat output) can improve with fewer mechanical components and a more reliable method of writing data bits to the drive.
It is like the 7200.10 is the Steve Austin of hard drives... better, stronger, faster. Since we're talking about the six million dollar man, we might as well also touch on the topic of price as related to the 7200.10. The drive was just released, and as with all new things, you can expect to pay a bit of a premium. A search of PriceGrabber shows a handful of online retailers carrying the drive, and all have a price tag of around $500 US! Just thinking that a single hard drive costs more than many complete OEM systems is a shock, but considering you are getting 3/4 TB for your 1/2 G may make it seem more appealing. At this price, that equates to about 67 cents per GB, which is quite competitive when compared to other drives with somewhat similar specifications.
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