Seagate just announced it has started shipping the new Barracuda 7200.12 series using all new 500GB platters with a record high areal density. Chinese website it168.com has already gotten their hands on a drive and have published a review. They have compared the drive with single-platter drives of the previous generations, 7200.10 250GB and 7200.11 320GB. The review show some interesting results.
The drive seem need more from the processor since the CPU utilization is up to 4% here, up from 2% of the last generation and 1% of the generation before that. Access times are lower though, although still in the millisecond range which many times higher than those of solid state drives.
The transfer results from HDTach and HD Tune Pro tests all show that the average, min and max rates are about the same as the previous generation, but the burst rate is actually up to 9% slower. PCMark on the other hand really loves the new drive and gets a score of 5502, while the 7200.11 gets only 3880 points.
The FastCopy test on the other hand shows the 7200.12 drive completely humiliating its precursors with twice the transfer rate, resulting in half the time to copy 23GB data. Overall the new drive does impress and with transfer rates around 100MB/s it is fast for a mechanical drive, but with the fast development of Solid State Drives the price/capacity ratio is starting to become the sole advantage of mechanical drives .
:: Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 500GB review (Chinese)
