Seagate delivers a carnivorous drive, and does something to curb our fears of data loss.
We’re one step away from having 1TB in a single disk drive, and it scares the hell out of us. On the one hand it’s incredibly cool, on the other hand losing that much data in one hit would be seriously crippling. Data security is a huge concern.Which obviously Seagate recognises, as besides being the first perpendicular desktop drive on the market (allowing Seagate to cram in 130 Gigabits of data per square inch) the 7200.10 introduces a few new features to keep your data safe – Adaptive Fly Height and Clean Sweep. The fly height is the distance between the head and the platter, and depending on conditions this can now be adjusted to maintain consistency of read data. Clean Sweep is a simple premise – it passes the drive head over the platter at power up to attempt to smooth out any irregularities along the disc.Hooking it into our test bench and making sure the SATA 1.5Gb/s jumper from the back was set to unlock it to its full potential, we ran HDTach using 32MB long zones. It pounds the competition with finesse, outperforming even Seagate’s own 7200.9 500GB drive, scoring 254MB/s burst, and 67.2MB/s average read compared to the earlier model’s 247.6 and 51.2MB/s respectively.It still doesn’t reach the average speed of 75.4MB/s achieved by WD’s Raptor 1500ADFD, but running at 2,800RPM slower it’s doing damn fine. In fact, throw them in RAID 0 (1.5TB of unformatted joy… *swoon*) and the scores run up to 274.6 and 132.8MB/s. Holy sweetness Batman.The price is extravagant compared to lower specced drives – however at the time of writing you can get said drive for almost $300 less if you’re willing to do a bit of a search. 250GB drives are still the sweet point though, being able to easily stack up three for close to two hundred dollars less than this single 750GB monster. This however doesn't make the 7200.10 any less impressive.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012