Data Transfer Diagram

The Barracuda 180 is not only a storage monster, but also a fast hard drive. Seagate uses horizontal mapping with this drive, so that it reaches maximum performance at the beginning of the medium, decreasing at the end of the medium.

Due to verification mechanisms, write performance clearly lags behind read performance. However, it is quite impressive to see that you can get > 30 MB/s read speed at the first 100 GB of this drive.

Data Transfer Performance

Reaching a maximum of exactly 45,000 kB/s, this 180 GB drive surpasses common 10,000 rpm drives. Unfortunately, this drive only runs at 7,200 rpm, which is the reason why the minimum data rate drops to ~ 18,000 kB/s at the end of the medium. Still you should keep the large capacity of this drive in mind, and also take the transfer diagram into account, where the average transfer rate stays at approximately 23 MB/s, even at the end of the medium. At this point, you will have already stored more than 140 GB of data!