Conclusion

With the Barracuda 7200.11 640 GB Seagate presents a solid hard disk. The throughput is also astonishing: 107 MByte/s when the drive does sequential writing operations. Altough this number doenst match 115 MByte/s sustained read and write performance but it is still a very good value. As usual with mechanical hard drives the performance decreases with smaller block sizes. So one can see pretty poor performance when the block size is 32 KByte or lower and random reads and writes are performed. Compared to the 1.5 TByte model the Barracuda 7200.11 640 GByte is a little slower in random operations. In this case the diffrences between the data densities of the platters seem to matter.

When operating the Barracuda 7200.11 640 GB is very quiet. Even when drive reads or writes data one nearly can't hear it. So the proclaimed acoustic pressure of 27 dB respectively 29 dB won't be crossed. The maximal power consumtion of 12 Watt and 8 Watts in idle are also good values.

The Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 640 GByte is a solid product and we can recommend it as a data gatherer, a fundament of a game PC or for a worstation.

Soon one will be able to buy the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 640 GByte at PCP for about CHF 126.-

Authors: m.buechel@ocaholic.ch and m.seiler@ocaholic.ch