I have had many people ask me including fellow network administrators, Information Technology Consultants, College Students and Business Owners what is the difference between the Seagate ST31000528AS drive and the Seagate ST31000524AS drive?

The only real difference between these two seagate barracuda drives is read and write performance. Overall both of these drives are considered high quality and have proven to be reliable if used correctly.

I personally use and recommend Seagate Barracuda hard-drives and use them when I need reliable SATA drives. They serve their purpose well if they are used correctly in the right environment and situation.

You probably won’t notice a difference in performance between the two different drives unless you are using the hard drives on a RAID array or MIRROR array and are using the hard drives to store large amounts of data where read and write performance is important such as on a file server, database server, email server, terminal server or even a web server.

Both hard drives are in the same ball park as far as price is concerned so there is no good reason to choose the slower drive unless you are using a 3.0Gb/s bus where you would not be able to take advantage of the faster hard drive – Seagate ST31000524AS anyways.

Here is a simple comparison between the two Seagate Barracuda Drives:

Seagate ST31000528AS

Series Barracuda

Interface SATA 3.0Gb/s

Capacity 1TB

RPM 7200

Cache 32MB

Average Latency 4.16ms

Form Factor 3.5 inches

VS

Seagate ST31000524AS

Series Barracuda

Interface SATA 6.0Gb/s

Capacity 1TB

RPM 7200

Cache 32MB

Average Latency 4.16ms

Form Factor 3.5 inches

As you can see above the only real difference between the two Seagate Barracuda hard drives is the Seagate ST31000528AS has a read / write speed of 3.0Gb/s while the Seagate ST31000524AS has a read / write speed of 6.0Gb/s.

Obviously I would prefer the faster hard-drive and both are high quality and reliable for small to medium sized business and if properly configured will make you happy. 

When fellow network administrators or and small and medium sized businesses in and around Orlando Florida and Central Florida turn to me for technology advise and ask me which hard drive between the two models would I personally prefer and I would choose the faster drive because well it has a read / write speed double that of the Seagate ST31000528AS 

Written by, Chris Ondo

Source by Chris Ondo