Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5 TB HDD

http://www.seagate.com/
$130
By: Chris Angelini

It goes without saying that adding capacity is ridiculously cheap right now. Seagate’s 1 TB Barracuda sells online for less than $100, and its latest 1.5 TB drive goes for just $20 more than that. Incredible, isn’t it? For about $250 bucks, you can have a terabyte and a half, mirrored. Or, you could get a three-bay NAS box like the Thecus unit covered in Part 1 of Tom’s Holiday Buyer’s Guide and centralize all of your music, videos, and documents on a network.

As Patrick observed in the conclusion of his Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5 TB review, Seagate is the only game in town with a 1.5 TB offering heading into the end of 2008. Though it might not be the fastest drive available, it boasts excellent throughput and serves as a great storage archive. To that end, it’d make a fantastic complement to an SSD or two in a high-end enthusiast machine.

No doubt you’ve heard about the problems reported by some users of the 1.5 TB drive reported here. For what it’s worth, Patrick didn’t experience any trouble with the drive in his review, nor have I had any problems in using the drive running benchmarks on my test bench. Nevertheless, Seagate has acknowledged an issue with its largest drives and has a firmware fix to rectify it. If you’re affected, snag the update—otherwise, enjoy the wonderful world of massive capacity.