Seagate Barracuda 3TB 7200RPM HD Review

There are several technologies underpinning the Barracuda 3TB, and we’ll look at each one in turn.

SmartAlign
We’ve previously told you about SmartAlign, but here’s a recap. As 4096 byte-sized sectors supplant 512-byte sectors industry-wide and enable higher-capacity drives with better error correction at lower prices, the tradeoff is that there can be some performance issues caused by misaligned hard drive partitions.

Seagate developed SmartAlign to deal with the issue. SmartAlign is firmware that automatically, without user intervention, takes care of the misalignments without negatively impacting the hard drive’s performance.

AcuTrac
Seagate’s AcuTrac technology is an attempt to solve a few problems pertaining to storage density and reliability. In brief, areal density is how close each individual bit of data, recorded on magnetic particles, is to its neighbors. Engineers figured out a way to stand those magnetic particles perpendicular to the platters to increase bits per inch (BPI, a measure of areal density) and thus increase per-platter density. Track density is another measure of areal density, and it’s measured in tracks per inch (TPI), or how close together the concentric circles (the tracks in which drives store data) on a platter are.

Increasing both BPI and TPI to increase storage capacities were becoming an engineering problem, and in response, Seagate developed its AcuTrac technology.

With AcuTrac, Seagate has boosted its TPI from 250,000 to 340,000, making each track on a 3.5-inch disk just 75nm wide. AcuTrac technology also includes a better way to position the drive head to more accurately focus on the smaller tracks.