Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 1TB review

A 1TB internal hard disk may not seem very exciting now that 1.5TB and 2TB disks are available.

However, Seagate’s 1TB Barracuda 7200.12 uses just two 500GB platters, whereas other 1TB disks typically use three 333GB platters. Squeezing more data on to fewer platters, known as increasing data density, is one of the main ways in which manufacturers increase both capacity and performance.

The Barracuda raced through our file-transfer tests, and was one of the fastest internal disks we’ve seen. It wrote large files at 97MB/s and read them at 105.3MB/s. Small files were written at 81.3MB/s and read at 97.9MB/s. It’s faster than our current favourite 1TB disk, Samsung’s SpinPoint F1 DT (see below), at reading files but a little slower at writing them. The speed difference between the two is fairly small, though.

The Barracuda is inexpensive at just £68, or 7p per gigabyte, but the SpinPoint is cheaper still at just 6p per gigabyte. Given the relatively small performance difference between the two drives, the SpinPoint remains our top recommendation if you need a new internal hard disk for your PC.