Seagate Barracuda ST3500320AS SD15 7200.11

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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 :

Expert Review

Performance

We connected this drive to our test rig's SATA port to put it through our tailor-made test process. We used benchmarking tools such as H2Bench, HDTach, HD Tune, and SiSoftware Sandra Professional Business XIIc.

H2Bench is a low-level hard drive testing utility and gives an indication of the raw performance of the drive. The drive was not formatted while we conducted this test; it did not hold any filesystem data. The drive returned a score of 132.0 MB/s in the "core test", which is not one of the best we have seen so far, but is a good score nevertheless. We also measured the access times for the whole disk, and found them to be 12.46 ms for reading and 7.39 ms for writing.

HDTach RW 3.0.1.0 is yet another low-level test that does not require the hard drive to have a filesystem.

HD Tune Pro 3.00 is a hard disk benchmarking utility capable of performing lower-level as well as filesystem benchmarks and displaying the result in the form of a graph. We ran the read as well as the write test to measure the transfer speeds, burst speeds, and access time across the entire drive -- and obtained the results as in the figure.

The results of the HD Tune Pro 3.00 Read Benchmark

And of the Write Benchmark

HD Tune File Benchmark

Note that the temperature of the drive never crossed 40 degrees centigrade during the entire course of the test.

SiSoftware Sandra Professional Business XIIc: We created a fresh NTFS partition on the test hard drive and ran the File System benchmark module on the freshly-formatted partition.

The drive returned up an index of 88.7 and an access time of 9 ms. As you can see in the graph above, this drive exhibits commendable performance when compared to other 500GB drives.