Aggravated Media

When Seagate announced their 1.5TB hard disk (oddly still placed in the Barracuda 7200.11 family instead of a new category) a few months back, you obviously expected lots more space. But I don’t think any of us, at least at first, expected more performance to boot. But it turns out that the Seagate ST31500341AS is, in fact, a faster drive than its 1TB and 500GB predecessors — by quite a bit.

Yes, this is not an ES2 ‘enterprise’ disk, for those already scoffing at it. Being an AS drive it is still considered a consumer driver. But bear this in mind, the MBTF listed for this drive is 750,000 hours. That’s pretty damned good for a commodity drive, and 250,000 higher than previous family models.

Now… about that speed. Quickly I’ll not that Tom’s Hardware witnessed burst of speed up to 127 MB/s in their tests. Of course, burst numbers are almost meaningless, but they do give you a sort of feel for the underlying performance to be had. So I’ve done some quick tests to give you an idea of what this drive is like in the real world. In that regard, I’ve included all the usual speed test suspects, but included numbers from John Flowers’ new HD Speed Test (Unscale.com) for those of you whose drive use involves digital video.

Posted in Hardware/Software, Useful & Instructional