MaximumPC 2002 09

http://www.maximumpc.com | FEB 09 |MAMAMAXIMXIMXIMXIMUUUUMMPPPCC| 17

And the Winner Is...

W

e love the Velociraptor—the speed and reliability of the Rap-

tor line are legendary for good reason. But we have to give

the Seagate Barracuda 1.5TB more props for sheer size and value.

If we had our druthers, we’d say get both drives—the Velocirap-

tor for your OS and speed-sensitive applications and games, and the

Barracuda for media storage and backup. But if you can aff ord only

one drive, the Barracuda’s the way to go.

At 12 cents per gigabyte, with nonburst speeds approaching

those of the Velociraptor, Seagate’s drive off ers the perfect combina-

tion of size and performance at a killer price. Who could ask for

anything more?

SEAGATE BARRACUDA 7200.11 1.5TB

$225, http://www.seagate.com

ROUND 3
RELIABILITY
Some 1.5TB Barracuda
drives suffered intermit-
tent random pauses in OS
X, Linux, and Windows
Vista, but Seagate has
since issued a firmware
fix that seems to have re-
solved the problem.
Both the Barracuda
and Raptor have long-
rated life spans. The Sea-
gate Barracuda is rated
at 750,000 hours MTBF
(mean time before failure,
or average life span),
which is impressive, but
the Velociraptor, built to
enterprise drive stan-
dards, sports an MTBF of
1.4 million hours.
WINNER: VELOCIRAPTOR

Velociraptor Western Digital Western Digital Velociraptor Velociraptor Western Digital Western Digital Western Digital Velociraptor Western Digital BarracudaSeagateSeagateSeagateBarracudaSeagateBarracudaSeagateBarracudaSeagate

Size 300GB 300GB 1.5TB1.5TB

HD Tach Burst (MB/s) 249.7 209.

HD Tach Random Access (ms) 7.1 15.

HD Tach Average Read (MB/s) 108.4 104.

HD Tach Average Write (MB/s) 100.0 103.

PCMark05 Overall 9,450 5,

Best scores are bolded. HD Tach version 3.0.1.0 used.

BENCHMARKS

ROUND 4

PRICE PER GIGABYTE

The 300GB Velociraptor

will cost you about $

(street price), or 93 cents

per gigabyte, while the

1.5TB Barracuda can be

found for $180—about

12 cents per gigabyte.

That’s a big difference,

especially considering

the Barracuda’s more-

than-respectable read

and write performance.

In fact, it’s hard to fi nd

any hard drive with a

better price/capacity or

price/performance ratio

than the Barracuda.

WINNER: BARRACUDA