Seagate Barracuda 1TB 7200.11 Hard Drive

Vote: Thumbs Down or Thumbs Up Our Rating: 90%       Manufacturer: Seagate

The Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 Drive

The Barracuda 7200.11 hard disk drive is nothing revolutionary in its style or design; it’s a standard looking 3.5” desktop drive. In fact, it looks identical to the 7200.8, 7200.9 and 7200.10 drives, with only the sticker on the top letting you know what version drive and size you are running. One thing we did notice was the drive was rather heavy compared to our Western Digital 750GB and Hitachi drives we have had in the labs.

The top of the drive has a non-removable sticker placed on it with the model number, capacity of the drive, serial number and a few extra bits of info on the specifications. Apart from this there are no special instructions you need to worry about.

The back and bottom of the drive are almost identical to the last series of drives from Seagate. Following in the steps of Western Digital and Hitachi drives, there are no resistors, capacitors or IC chips on the bottom of the PCB, these are put between the PCB and the drive casing which prevents any accidental short circuits if they come in contact with another drive in tight HDD cage enclosures. Yes, this has happened to me in the past!

The drive we were sent is the 1TB model using 32MB of cache memory and the Serial ATA protocol interface. You can get 16MB cache models in the 500GB and 750GB range and 32MB cache in the 750MB and 1TB range. IDE is available in 500GB models if you’re still after older IDE interface drives, but with the limited IDE ports on new boards it makes more sense to go Serial ATA these days.