Seagate 7200.11 500GB review

Keywords: Seagate 500gb 7200.11 review raptor
Next Level Hardware has reviewed the new Barracuda 7200.11, in the 500GB flavor.
Featuring capacities of up to 1TB and 32MB of cache, the new HDD is one of the top performing models currently available that has a 7200RPM spindle speed.

The new model manages to challenge Western Digital's 150GB Raptor - a 10k RPM drive - while it also manages to overtake it in non random access bound usage.
Raid 0 benchmarks are also available, where two drives simply destroy any hopes of the single Raptor. One of the only only exceptions is the time it took to boot windows, due to the higher Random Access Time(RAT) of each single drive. The RAID 0 RAT results are very good but probably not accurate or windows booting should have also been faster that the Raptor.
The other, not so good results from a RAID 0 of 7200.11 drives, place it in the same level as a single raptor, making them a good option for someone looking for both harddisk space and speed.

The new Seagate drive isn't all alone though, the 7K1000 from Hitachi also is able to challenge the Raptor, in a single drive environment. It has been available for almost a year and also features 32MB of cache.

Both the 7K1000 and the new 500GB 7200.11 are very capable drives, providing a lower cost per GB and a good performance alternative, leaving the Raptors as the choice for the hardcore enthusiast looking for only the best, without looking at cost.