Just recently, Seagate released several new hard drives giving computer owners more storage space and faster data transfer speeds. The new Momentus for notebook computers is a great example as it brings notebook storage much closer to the capacity and speeds of their desktop counterparts. Today we take a look at Seagate's new Barracuda 7200.12 for desktop computers. Will we witness another big step in hard drive performance or is the 12th generation of Barracuda a reworked 7200.11? Let's pop open a Mountain Dew and dig into the new 7200.12 to see what's all about...

Key improvements

The 7200.12 comes in six variations ranging from 1 Terabyte all the way down to 160 Gigabytes. The 1-TB and 750-GB versions boast a massive 32-MB cache, the 500-GB has 16-MB cache, and the 320, 250 and 160-GB all have 8-MB each.

The Barracuda 7200.12 family hard drives are ideal for every day desktop applications such as workstations, desktop RAID, gaming PCs, high-end PCs, mainstream PCs and USB/FireWire/eSATA external storage. Seagate is also boasting about "Green" milestones such as including 70 percent or more recycled material in the 7200.12 family. Anything to help the environment right?

As far as speed is concerned, the 7200.12 family is faster than earlier 7200.11 hard drives boasting speeds of up to 160 MB/s maximum sustained data rate and up to 3 Gb/s instantaneous burst. That's a pretty large step in sustained data transfer rate so we should see a very nice performance increase over the 7200.11 family.

Read more details on the 7200.12 here.

Barracuda 7200.12 Specifications

Recent 7200.11 Firmware Debacle

I hate to bring up public relations issues in a review, but this one is hard to avoid. The Barracuda 7200.12 has come to us right in the middle of a huge PR mess with the 7200.11. Back in January 2009, Seagate informed the public that "some" 7200.11 hard drives made their way to the market loaded with bad firmware which "could" cause the hard drives to fail, most notably the 1.5TB version. Later we learned the bad firmware was more wide spread than we were led to believe and was not limited to only the 1.5TB version. Seagate swiftly released a new firmware update to hard drive owners, only to recall the update a few days later. Apparently, the new firmware update also had an issue. As you can imagine, this sparked outrage and what first started out as a correctable issue, turned into a public relations nightmare. To make matters worse, many consumers who have absolutely no business plugging in a keyboard without adult supervision, let alone flashing a hard drive, made ill fated attempts at flashing drives just because they read about it in some hardware forum.

Sometimes companies have a way of putting out fires with gasoline, which I believe is exactly what has happened here. In my opinion, Seagate made matters worse by releasing firmware updates directly to the customer. Regardless of warning the customer that firmware updates should only be handled by a professional, people still are attempting to flash their hard drives whether they need to or not. Is it me or am I the only one who lives by the rule "if it's not broke don't fix it"?

In my lifetime I have only had two Seagate hard drives fail. The first one died after about a year of use and Seagate promptly RMA'd it with no questions ask. The second drive died because I dropped it on to solid concrete in which it must have bounced at least a foot off the floor. Trust me, this was not a firmware issue... For the people who are actually having an issue with their hard drive, please do yourself a favor and call Seagate or use the Seagate RMA process. Let the professionals handle it.