Introduction

Today's storage requirements are growing at an exponential rate. Back when PC's were used primarily for office work, hard disks only stored word documents, spread sheets and email, all of which would require only a fraction of what today's PC's hold.

The multimedia and digital age has pushed things to the extreme. Rather than word documents and the like we are storing movies, music and pictures as well, which by their nature even when under compression require large amounts of storage space.

Compression technologies have come in the form of DivX/Xvid, JPEG and MP3; though these have helped reduce space requirements somewhat, movie files can still take between 600MB to 1.2GB. If you're planning on recording from your TV to store your favourite TV episodes or movies, even 500GB can run out pretty quick.

Today's hard disks have moved to extreme sizes with the latest drives to hit the 1TB barrier, and this will soon be broken with new technologies for improving storage densities.

We have been given a new HDD from Seagate to test based on their ever growing Barracuda 7200 series, this being the 11th generation drive which they call the 7200.11 and it boasts a whopping 1TB storage capacity. How does it stack up? Let's go find out.