Seagate Barracuda ES 750 GB HDD

Anubhav Verma

Hard drive capacities are really shooting through the roof. The latest Barracuda drive from Seagate for instance has a whopping capacity of 750 GB. It is the first drive we reviewed that uses perpendicular recording.

It is also perhaps the first such drive to enter the market as well. In Perpendicular recording, the data bits are arranged perpendicular to the disk's platter, as against the lateral alignment of bits in legacy drives. This allows higher capacity drives to be built within the same form factor, thereby opening a plethora of opportunities and applications of storage technology.

For instance, it can be used to create smaller-sized yet higher capacity NAS boxes. It can be used to meet the needs of even the most demanding multimedia professionals. Small offices could even use this as a backup medium or place it in a file server, thereby eliminating the need for a NAS box.

Even on the performance front, the drive came out with flying colors. Compared to Maxtor's 500 GB RE2 drive (reviewed in May 2006) that clocked 58.1 MBps average transfer rate, the Seagate clocked 62.15 MBps. Likewise in Business Disk and High-end Disk Winmark tests, which check a drive's throughput for business productivity and high-end applications, the Seagate drive scored 18.3 MBps and 28 MBps respectively. Maxtor drive on the other hand stood at 11.9 MBps and 33.3 MBps. Likewise, the Barracuda clocked a lower access time of 12.6 ms as against Maxtor's 13.6 ms. The CPU Utilization of Barracuda was high at 91.3%, but Maxtor clocked higher at 95.9%.

Bottom Line: An excellent drive given the capacity and performance. Its per GB cost comes to just Rs. 35 per GB, thanks to the Perpendicular Recording technology.