Seagate 500GB 7200.9 HD Review

Introduction

Storage just gets bigger and bigger, but there are some good reasons for that. For one thing, files keep getting bigger as high-definition programming gains popularity. Also, games are commonly installing at 3GB and larger these days as well. Another trend that is driving storage size up is the increase in the number of files that people are storing, especially music files, videos and high-resolution photos. Still, with all that said, it's hard for me to imagine the average user needing more than 200GB. Plenty of people must be using more than that, though, since all the major hard drive manufacturers are offering 500GB drives now. Seagate and Hitachi were the first to offer 500GB drives, and they were the only ones for months. 600GB+ drives are on the horizon, but for now, 500GB is as big as they get.

Today, I have the pleasure of reviewing Seagate's 500GB Barracuda 7200.9 SATA 3Gb/s hard drive. I actually have two on hand for a whopping 1TB (TB = terabyte) of storage (well, actually it's around 930GB). So, keep on reading if you want to see how the 500GB Barracuda 7200.9 performs in single and RAID 0 configurations.

Specifications

Before getting to the performance of the 500GB Barracuda 7200.9, let's take a look at its specifications. There really isn't anything too surprising about this drive on paper.