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  Seagate Barracuda ST3500320AS SD15 7200.11

  Jayesh Limaye, Jun 05, 2008 1949 hrs IST

  Will this drive be more than a match for the ruling champion from Western Digital? Read on

  Super fast speeds, runs cool, huge capacity, SATA-II.

  None.

  Expert Rating :

  

  

Page 1 - Specifications Page 2 - The Drive Page 3 - HDTune Pro, HDTach & SiSoft S.A.N.D.R.A Page 4 - Real-world tests & Conclusion

The Drive

This drive boasts of 500GB, which is fast attaining mainstream status. This seems like a huge amount of space and should be more than enough to store all your games, movies, songs and data. It features the perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology that enables better areal density (or bit density) in this drive. The 7200 RPM means better seeks, and the huge 32 MB buffer means an uninterrupted data transfer.

The ST3500320AS is a 7200.11 series drive and looks like any other internal hard drive from Seagate. If you look at the SATA connector side, you will notice that there is a jumper present on the right. This jumper is to set the drive to the older SATA-I mode for backward compatibility with older motherboards that do not support SATA-II. This jumper is very small and you need a pair of tweezers to pull it out. Without the jumper put in, the drive operates in the SATA-II mode. The drive is already set to operate in SATA-I mode when you purchase it, so you must remember to remove this jumper for it to operate in SATA-II mode.

Only a small part of the drive electronics is exposed from below

There are some improvements from the 7200.10 to the 7200.11 series drives. One important improvement is that the areal density has been increased from 188 GB per platter to 250 GB. This is therefore being touted as featuring "second generation PMR recording technology". Another improvement is the doubling of the buffer size from 16 MB to 32 MB. Earlier only 1 TB drives used to feature such a huge amount of cache. Enough talk about the specs, let find out how it performs.

Page 1 - Specifications Page 2 - The Drive Page 3 - HDTune Pro, HDTach & SiSoft S.A.N.D.R.A Page 4 - Real-world tests & Conclusion

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