The new Seagate Barracuda 7200.12s have a few advantages over the previous generation.  There is no bad firmware to give this generation a bad name, as well they have made a move to 500GB platters for this generation.  Bjorn3D’s testing showed that the move did not result in a clear improvement; speed for burst and read seems to have decreased, while the write speed has increased.  On the other hand, once in a RAID environment the drives showed improvements from the previous generation, in addition to needing less power and creating less noise.

“As the platter density increases, hard drives are able to pack more data per disk and, as a result, the time for data retrieval is shorter due to less time that is needed to find the bits of data. Not only that, hard drives are able to perform faster. The larger areal density also allows hard drive manufactures to exceed the storage capacity of 1TB and now we are seeing HD manufactures breaking into 1.5TB and even 2TB. Seagate’s latest Barracuda 7200.12 is the company’s first hard drive that comes with 500 GB platter density.”

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