The big winner from our 1 TB hard disk drive round-up was clearly Seagate Barracuda 7200.12, which achieved an average transfer rate higher than all other hard disk drives we tested in all three programs we used. Costing the same as Samsung Spinpoint F1 and Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 and less than Western Digital Caviar Black, for the average user it doesn’t make any sense buying any other 1 TB hard disk drive model but Barracuda 7200.12.

“Green” hard disk drives are a little bit cheaper, but to be honest we don’t think saving USD 5 or USD 10 or 5 W in consumption makes any sense compared to the huge difference in performance you will see (12 to 39%). Hard drives already consume little power (8 W - 10 W), so the impact on your electricity bill will be negligible.

Of course our opinion would be different if we were talking about hard drives targeted to laptops, but this isn’t the case. Saving 4 to 5 W per drive can make sense on datacenters, however administrators will be faced not only with the power consumption vs. performance dilemma, but also reliability, as enterprise-class drives are the correct choice for this application.

On the enterprise-class arena, the winner was Western Digital RE3, but unfortunately we only had Seagate ES.2 to compare it against. Samsung kept promising us to send their latest 1 TB enterprise-class hard disk drive to be included in this round-up since last October, what never happened.