Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 ST31000528AS hard drive

The Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 ST31000528AS is a 1TB internal desktop hard drive with a 32MB cache and a spin speed of 7200rpm. It has two 500GB platters and offers very fast transfer speeds.

As hard drives begin to hit 2TB capacities (the Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB (WD20EADS), for example), 1TB hard drives are starting to get cheaper. The Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 ST31000528AS, with its formatted capacity of 931GB, is a good example of this. It costs just $189, which equates to a cost per gigabyte of 20.3 cents. This is better value than the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB hard drive, for example, especially when its excellent speeds are considered.

To test the speed of the hard drive, we copied a folder with 19.4GB of data between it and our test PC, which uses a Western Digital VelociRaptor (WD3000GLFS) hard drive.

The Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 ST31000528AS achieved a write speed of 78.49 megabytes per second and a read speed of 83.77MBps. When copying the data folder from one location on the drive to another, it delivered a speed of 32.75MBps.

By comparison, the previous generation of this drive, the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11, provided a read speed of 69.12MBps, a write speed of 72.02MBps and a folder-to-folder copy speed of 20.85MBps.

In fact, the high-performance Western Digital VelociRaptor (WD3000GLFS) hard drive, which is renowned for its speed, returned a read speed of 92.8MBps — only approximately 10MBps faster than the Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 ST31000528AS. So you can see the Barracuda 7200.12 is very quick.

This means that if you're a casual or serious gamer who can't afford to splurge on the Western Digital VelociRaptor (WD3000GLFS), or one who wants a drive with more space, the Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 ST31000528AS might fit the bill.

We found that despite its excellent speeds in our tests, the Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 ST31000528AS hard drive ran at an average temperature of 38 degrees Celsius, even after hours of data crunching. While results will vary depending on your case and other components, you should find that it stays within a safe working temperature.

The Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 ST31000528AS is therefore good value. It's a very fast 1TB hard drive that is a solid choice for any PC.