Barracuda 7200.11 SATA 1Tb Hard Drive - ST31000340AS product reviews

Hard drives are funny critters. You treat them well and they perform for a few years then tend to click a bit then die. Or worse. Years ago, data protection would have required the purchase of an external high-capacity drive such as the ZIP drive, a tape-drive, or some fancy removable hard-drive racking. Nowdays, you have so much more choice, ranging from writable optical discs, spacious removable storage devices, or even online backup services offered by drive-farms. But I tell ya... it's getting mighty impressive when you can slap a terabyte of storage into your own machine and spend a few months downloading like a robot to fill it!

Now I must clarify here that the storage industry doesn't see volumes the way we do. For them, values are decimal, not binary... so 1tb is 1,000gb, 1gb is 1,000mb, 1mb is 1,000kb, 1kb is 1,000 bytes... which means this little beauty actually holds more like 930gb in 'real' binary volumes. But let's face it folks... that is still a WHOPPING amount... eg.
    •  198 full DVD-R's
    •  1361 entire CD's
    •  190668 MP3 tracks (like, 15889 HOURS of music!)
    •  2723 45-minute AVI's (That's all of the Stargate SG1 episodes 10 times over, and more!)

But how fast is it? Well, with all throttles wide open, the cache fully utilised, and with a pile of typical Windows crud running in the background, I managed to pump this baby up to 96mb/sec write, and a blazing 102.4mb/sec read speed... I tell ya, Photoshop never ran so smooth and zippy! In the end, I decided to partition the drive up and allocate a full 20gb partition solely as virtual memory, and my system ain't never run'd so good, baby!

I have been thrashing this little stunner for a good solid 5 weeks, hammering it with all sorts of nifty little utilities designed to break-test it... and she just won't fail under a loading that killed a lower-spec'd drive in less than a week! I am so impressed, I might actually have to go and buy a few for the main server!

Overall, if this isn't the best there is in this price bracket, I am at a loss to say what is! Worth every penny, and with prices all over the place you might want to snap one up fast before shipping charges alone put them back out of reach. My only bug with this unit is that under extreme loads, such as would be found in a server-farm, this unit can heat up quite a bit, and may require some serious coolant options... but let's face it, for the home user, this is the best thing since hyper-caffeinated cola!