Several years ago I never imagined I would “need” a terabyte of storage. Fast forward to today with the explosion of digital media and it is easy to justify such a need. Once you do acquire such a large drive you may worry about reliability, as 1TB of data is a lot to lose. Other features such as drive speed also become critical concerns since drives tend to be a bottleneck in the typical system. Today we will test the Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 1TB hard drive in terms of speed, reliability, and value.

Before taking a closer look at the drive provided for review, let's take a look at some published data taken from the official product page on the Seagate website.

Features:

» 70% + recycled materials
» 12th Generation of world's most popular desktop hard drive
» Perpendicular magnetic recording technology
» Maximum sustained data rate (MB/s): 125
» Instantaneous burst (GB/s): 3

Our “green” friends will be pleased to see 70% or more of these hard drives are made from recycled materials.

Specifications:

» Capacity: 1TB
» Interface: SATA 3GB/s NCQ
» Cache (MB): 32MB
» Sustained Data Rate (MB/s): 125
» Spindle Speed (RPM): 7200
» Shock, Operating 2ms (Gs): 70
» Shock, Non-Operating 1ms (Gs): 300
» Acoustics, Idle (bels): 2.5
» Acoustics, Seek (bels): 2.7
» Average Latency (ms): 4.17
» Annualized Failure Rate: 0.34%
» Power – Operating, Average (W): <9.4
» Power – Idle, Average (W): <5.0
» Operating Temperature Range (*C): 0-60
» Warranty (years): 3

Our test sample has Model Number ST31000528AS. Note these drives come with a decent 3 year warranty, but not the 5 year warranty that you used to be able to expect from Seagate.