The ST1181677 can be called a pioneer, since it is the first drive to break the 100 GB barrier. As I already mentioned, this could only be achieved by increasing the amount of platters. However, have you ever noticed that the first drives to set new records in capacity never run at maximum rotation speeds? The DiamondMax 80 is just one example of this.

To achieve record-breaking capacity with the Barracuda 180, Seagate was forced to go one step back with respect to rotation speed, thus ensuring top performance and reasonable drive temperatures.

At the same time, a lower rotation speed is not necessarily an attractive as a feature, but let's be honest, any hard drive that doesn't run reliably in the first place is not worth buying, and ultimately, the Barracuda's conservative 7200 rpm should be proof of its reliability.

In any case, the Barracuda 180 is not meant to break speed records, but to provide as much storage capacity as possible.

As you will see in our benchmarks, Seagate did not even try to make a top performer out of this drive. Instead, they equipped the drive with a 16 MB buffer and concentrated on fast transfer speeds. For a drive that people will likely buy purely for storage reasons, the result is pretty respectable.