Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 500GB Review February 24, 2006 Brandon Sandman Bell

Introduction

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Nowadays gamers and hardware enthusiasts are driving an increasing portion of sales, and hardware manufacturers such as AMD, Intel, ATI, NVIDIA, and many others have recognized this. You wouldn’t drop over $1,000 on two high-end graphics cards for improving your performance in Microsoft Word after all would you?

But another emerging segment of the PC industry that’s beginning to grow rapidly is digital media PCs, or home theater PCs (HTPC) as they’re often dubbed by hardware enthusiasts. These PCs are used for audio/video playback, such as listening to high bit-rate MP3s, and watching DVDs or high-definition TV; and fit right at home in the living room/game room or den, sitting right alongside other home theater components inside the component stand such as your receiver. With the HTPC market continuing to grow, Microsoft, Intel, and many others are investing millions betting than an increasing number of consumers are going to hop on the HTPC craze.

Both Intel and AMD are working on lower-power derivatives of their latest desktop CPUs for use in these PCs, just as ATI and NVIDIA are promoting H.264 support in their latest GPUs (in addition to providing a line of TV tuner cards). Meanwhile, case manufacturers are preparing even snazzier chassis’ that fit into tinier spaces. Finally Microsoft has not only provided an OS custom-tailored for HTPC use (Windows Media Center Edition 2005), they’ve also tied their Xbox 360 to the HTPC platform by integrating support for streaming audio/video media into the Xbox 360. Xbox 360 users with an MCE 2005-based PC can stream audio/video files from their PC to their Xbox 360, including live or recorded TV and high-definition TV.

Ultimately if Microsoft, Intel, and others get their way, the HTPC will be the centerpiece of your media-viewing experience. Whether it’s watching HD-DVD or Blu-Ray movies on your 60” plasma via your HTPC, or streaming audio/video to other computers within your home network, the HTPC will become just as indispensable as the business PC of twenty years ago. Only this time they’re for play rather than work.

One of the key components to making this vision a reality is the hard drive. As anyone who’s recorded a high-definition TV program can tell you, recording a single 30-minute episode of The Simpsons will require gigabytes rather than megabytes of hard disk space. Just a one-second high-definition recording can take on average around 20MB of hard drive space!

With such great demands, having a large, speedy hard drive is essential for any HTPC. Of course, it also doesn’t hurt for gaming either. This is where Seagate’s latest hard drive comes in: the 500GB 7200.9.

Specifications

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The features list for Seagate’s 500GB 7200.9 Barracuda is impressive. For a 500GB hard drive, Seagate’s got all their bases covered and then some:

Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 500GB Specs
Avg Seek Time	8.5ms
Avg Latency	4.16ms
Spindle Speed	7200 RPM
Max Transfer Rate	300MB/sec
Cache Size	16MB (for 500GB model)
Platter Size	125GB (for 500GB model)
NCQ?	Yes
Capacities	80, 120, 160, 200, 250, 300, 400, 500GB
Idle Acoustics	2.8 bels
Idle Power Consumption	6.9W
Seek Power Consumption	8.1W
Warranty Length	5 years

So how does the Barracuda 7200.9 match up the competition? It’s closest competitor, the 500GB Hitachi 7K500 also boasts 300MB/sec transfer rates, and while no hard drive has ever come close to sustaining 300MB/sec, it is a feature most enthusiasts look for in a hard drive. The 7K500 also contains a 16MB buffer and spins at 7,200RPMs, just like the 7200.9, only its platter density is only 100GB per platter, with the drive containing five 100GB platters for a total of 500GB. In theory, with one extra platter in the 7K500, the drives performance suffers (assuming everything else remains equal) as the drive’s head has access to less data from the same physical area.

The 7K500 also lists slightly higher acoustics, at 3.1 bels versus 2.8 on the 7200.9, and is limited to a 3-year warranty, so the Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 provides and extra two years of warranty coverage. This may be an important consideration for a lot of folks, as hard drives tend to be longer term purchases than say video cards or CPUs, as you can usually migrate a hard drive from one PC to another with little or no hassles. AMD and Intel tend to change out processor sockets every 2-3 years (give or take a year or two), while ATI and NVIDIA’s graphics card cycles are notoriously short-lived.

Before we move on, it’s important to note that the specifications for Seagate’s 7200.9 line vary by capacity, for instance, smaller drives of 250GB or less only come with 16MB caches, platter size also varies by model and ranges from 100GB per platter (on the 100GB and 200GB drives) all the way up to 160GB per platter (on the 160GB drive only). The drive can also be found for the ATA/100 interface in addition to Serial ATA.

System setup

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System Setup

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200

ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe

2GB OCZ DDR400 SDRAM

ATI RADEON X1800 XT
CATALYST 6.2

500GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.9
500GB Hitachi 7K500
74GB Western Digital Raptor

Windows XP Professional SP1

DirectX 9.0c

Benchmarks

Half-Life 2
Half-Life 2: Lost Coast
Quake 4
HD Tach 3.01

HD Tach

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Load times, file copy, boot-up

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Notes

For our file copy test, we measured the time to copy one 450MB MPEG-2 file from one partition of the HDD to the other. All of these tests were conducted with a stopwatch, so there will be a slight margin of error for that.

Ballistics Report

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Feature set: From a pure features perspective, Seagate’s got everything covered with the Barracuda 7200.9 500GB. You’ve got 300MB transfer rates with native command queuing supported as well as a 7200RPM spindle speed, 16MB cache and a platter size of 125GB per platter. These are basically all the key features that will be found in the Serial ATA Rev 2.5 spec.

On top of this, Seagate provides some of the best warranty coverage in the industry. While the Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 is technically considered a consumer-level hard drive, it has the warranty coverage of one of the more expensive enterprise drives that you’d typically find in servers and workstations. Hard drive manufacturers have learned the hard way that end users in the consumer market often tend to do unwise things like shove their drives into cramped cases with little or no ventilation. This can have a profound affect on the lifetime of a hard drive. That’s precisely why many hard drive manufacturers only provide one or three year warranties on their consumer-level drives.

Obviously Seagate feels their Barracuda 7200.9 500GB is up to challenge in running in these types of environments without affecting the drive’s service life too adversely.

Performance and noise: The Barracuda 7200.9 turned in good performance numbers. Obviously it’s not designed to deliver WD Raptor-like performance, but at the same time the 7200.9 generates significantly less noise than the Raptor. When you combine this with the drive’s 500GB capacity, this makes the Barracuda 7200.9 500GB a very worthy drive for use in an HTPC.

Value: Right now the Barracuda 7200.9 500GB can be found online for just under $320 on Newegg, at 318.00 for the OEM drive (Newegg doesn’t carry the full retail model). That’s just 64 cents per gigabyte worth of storage, and makes it the least expensive 500GB SATA drive on the market. When you combine the Barracuda 7200.9’s appealing price with Seagate’s long track record for building quality drives and the 7200.9’s long feature list, it becomes an even more appealing upgrade option.

Cons

Platter Size: At just 125GB per platter, the Barracuda 7200.9 500GB doesn’t really stand out from the crowd in terms of platter density, although Seagate’s clearly got the edge in comparison to Hitachi’s 500GB 7K500 HDD. This is being a little nitpicky though.

It would also be nice to see the Barracuda 7200.9 performing just a little bit better given its feature set.

Price (in relation to Caviar RE2): While the Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 is the least expensive of the 500GB hard disk drives on the market, Western Digital’s Caviar RE2 is another popular option for enthusiasts looking for a lot of storage on a budget. The drive offers 400GB of total capacity – nearly as big as the Seagate – but get this, street prices on Caviar RE2 drives are over $100 less than the Barracuda 7200.9 at around $210. This gives you an even better bargain than the Barracuda 7200.9 at 53 cents per gigabyte! Unfortunately, we didn’t have an RE2 drive available for testing.

Final Verdict

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