#002-Seagate Barracuda 7 200.11RPM 500GB Hard Drive Review

2 12 2008

Product #: ST3500320AS

This OEM Serial ATA Hard Drive from Seagate is a very high performance drive for the price.

This drive features a 3 Gb/s NCQ Interface with a fast 105mbps transfer rate and a 32mb cache. It spins with an RPM of 7200.11 like most hard drives today. It also features 976,773,168 guaranteed sectors. The average latency of this drive is 4.16ms(nominal);A Random read seek time of <8.5 msec and a random write seek time of <9.5msec. With an annual failure rate of 0.34%; This drive is very reliable. The physical dimensions of this drive are 26.1mm(H)x101.6mm(W)x146.99mm(L) with a typical weight of 543 grams(1.99lbs).

If you want the full performance with the 3Gb/s you will have to remove the jumper as Seagate ships it with the jumper set to the 1.5Gb/s transfer rate. This drive is also very quiet and runs at an average temperature of around 50 Degrees Celsius(122F) and also does not consume much power with a maximum current of 3.0 DC amps.