Features & Specifications
Seagate’s Barracuda 7200.11 ST31000340AS 1TB internal HDD has a 7200-RPM spindle speed and can operate with SATA 3.0Gb/s or 1.5Gb/s with NCQ. Seagate promises the average latency to be 4.16ms and the drive uses a 32MB cache. Four platters and eight heads compose the internals of the drive. The Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31000340AS 1TB internal HDD has a mean time before failure of 750,000 hours and requires 2.8 VDC to operate. Shock tolerance while the drive is operating is 63Gs with shock tolerance of 300Gs when the drive is not operating. Acoustics are 2.7 bels at idle and 2.9 bels during seek.

Test Machine
I tested the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31000340AS 1TB internal HDD in a test machine with the following specifications:

• CPU- Intel QX6850
• Mainboard- XFX 680i
• RAM- 2GB OCZ DDR2 6400
• OS- Windows XP Pro

Benchmark’s & Testing
To test the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31000340AS 1TB internal HDD I used HD Tach, Sandra XII, and times the moving of a large file folder to and from the drive with a stopwatch. The first test up for the drive is HD Tach.

HD Tach
HD Tach showed that the random access time for the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31000340AS 1TB internal HDD was 12.7ms and the average read speed was 86.3MB/s. To compare the Hitachi 1TB drive recorded a read speed of 72.6 MB/s and a random access time of 12.8ms. The Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31000340AS 1TB internal HDD was significantly faster in HD Tach’s read speed tests.

Sandra XII
Next up was testing with Sandra XII using the physical discs benchmark. The drive index for the Seagate drive is 75MB/s and the random access time was 13ms. To compare the Hitachi 1TB drive recorded a drive index of 79MB/s and the same 13ms random access time. In Sandra XII, the Hitachi Deskstar 1TB wins.

File Read & Write
The final test was the copy of 435MB of photos in a folder to the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31000340AS 1TB internal HDD and then writing the same folder back to the other system drive in my computer. It took 1-minute and 19-seconds to write the folder to the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31000340AS 1TB internal HDD and it took 28-seconds to copy the same folder back to another system drive.