Date: September 11, 2006 - Author: Rob Williams - Editor: Greg King
Though there are larger drives available, they do not fit into everyones budget. Simply going from 500GB to 320GB cuts the price in half, which makes this almost a steal. We will compare with one of our recently reviewed 500GB drives and see how it stacks up.
"I need more storage" is something I seem to say with each year that passes. I am sure I am not alone in this. Only a few years ago, 100GB proved to be enough storage for most anyone, but then the digital explosion occurred. DVD backups, 20,000 music files, games that have 10GB installs, et cetera. Many resort to burning their goods and grabbing them when they need, instead of keeping them on the hard drive due to lack of space.
This is becoming less and less of a requirement though since storage prices are so low now, that you could pick up a couple huge storage drives for the price of a midrange video card. As I mentioned in the intro, there are 500GB and 750GB drives available, but they retail for $259.99US and $399.99US, respectively. These are great prices. When we reviewed the 750GB in May, it retailed for $499.99US, so there is an instant 20% drop in price. These large capacity drives though are designed really for people who want the -most- storage space in the smallest area. IE: 1TB with two drives as opposed to three. Video production or some other intensive multi-media processes come to mind.
What about the regular Joe, though? I am one of those people who does have quite a large music collection, but I'm also a budget shopper so I don't mind getting a smaller drive if the price is right. I have mentioned that the 500GB version of this drive retails for $259.99US, or $0.52 per GB. The 320GB we are looking at today retails for $94.99US, or $0.30 per GB. That's quite a substantial savings! To put things in perspective, for the same price as a single 750GB drive, you could pick up four of these for 1.28TB in a RAID configuration if you wish. That's a -lot- of storage for such a low price! Great times in the storage market!
For some though, price doesn't matter that much if the performance is sluggish. That's one thing we will touch on in this review. I will be comparing this drive to the recently reviewed Seagate Barracuda 500GB 7200.9.
Here is some of the official features, as delivered by Seagate themselves.
The Barracuda 7200.10 is the largest, most reliable disc drive around. New perpendicular recording technology supports vertically stored data bits, enabling increased areal density and dependability for workstations and performance PCs. Additionally, the Barracuda 7200.10 is available in SATA 3Gb/s, SATA 1.5Gb/s and ATA/100 interfaces.
For those of you who enjoy knowing every small detail about the product they are considering... eat up:
As seen in the details above, this drive takes advantage of Perpendicular Magnetic Recording. For a brief overview of what this is, you can check out page 2 of our Seagate 750GB drive. Though the process was not needed to cram all that space in there, it may help with performance. But, there's only one way to find out!
Throughout all of our benchmarks regardless of what we are reviewing, testing is done in a clean and stand-alone version of Windows XP Professional with SP2. Prior to testing, these conditions are met:
If you are interested in using the same benchmarks as us, feel free to visit the developers website:
The testing rig used for today's benchmarking is as follows:I will be comparing this 320GB drive to the previously reviewed 500GB Seagate 7200.9 drive. Now, there will be differences between the two drives in the tests, because the 320GB is a newer 7200.10 model. Still, this is a comparison between a $95 drive and a $260 one. Things should be interesting!
As expected, the 320GB cleaned up here, but even moreso than I expected in the average read tests. The 7200.10 drive scored a full 14MB/s better then the 500GB. Impressive... that's a 21% increase. Nothing to scoff at, for sure.
Here is where differences between HD Tach and HD Tune become evident. The results varied quite a bit in the previous test, but here they are so close it's scary. All of the read tests were -identical- to one another, but started to sway a bit with the Latency and Burst. It wouldn't even be right to conclude a winner here... they are the same.
The exact same goes for our Sandra and PC Mark tests. The only thing that proved different was the PC Mark score, a mere 0.05% difference.
The real world tests are rather simple. So simple in fact, that I almost feel like I am taking the easy road out. I have four sets of files... three equal 4GB and the other is 8GB:
This set was copied to the testing drive, and then were copied to another portion of the disk. Results are in seconds, and of course the lower the better.
This chart agrees a lot more with HD Tach than with HD Tune and PC Mark. There are some very evident differences here.. with the 320GB drive easily coming on top from each test. The 8GB file copied 20%+ faster on the 320GB... so the benefits of the 7200.10 series is quite apparent. These tests are not as far fetched as you may think though... how often do you move a 4GB ISO around? I do it often, especially with Linux distro downloads, and the like. That's why this type of test is rather useful.
This is a great drive, there's no two ways about it. In fact, I am giving it a 10/10 and our Editors choice. That may seem a little high, but this drive well deserves it. In the same price/density range, we have a Western Digital 320GB drive that retails for about $6 more. That drive is slightly slower in the latency department, but it's so small it doesn't matter. However, that drive is the SE2 version, which should prove to not be as fast as the 7200.10 enterprise drives. In addition to that, Seagate offers a full 5-year warranty, while the WD only offers 3. I think it's clear that this drive earns its great rating.
I bought this hard drive last month when I was building my AM2 system, and have been extremely pleased with it. For the price... there is nothing to complain about. In addition to that though, it offers great speed as we have seen in our tests. In the end, if you are looking for big storage or a RAID setup but don't want to haul out a huge wad of cash, I would highly recommend you take a look at the Barracuda 7200.10 320GB hard drive.
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