The Barracuda 7200.7 line comes in a variety of capacities and cache levels – a 40GB and 120GB version have already been catalogued, but there is also this 120GB version with a beefier cache. Unfortunately, as I discovered, many of the 7200.7 drives have a habit of growing bad sectors from time to time.
The Drive
Visually similar to the 120GB model with 2MB cache, this version has a more matte cover despite also being made in Singapore.
Otherwise, compared with the other Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 drives, it is visually unremarkable.
Performance Tests
CrystalDiskInfo
The drive reports running a reasonable amount of hours, with the same firmware 3.06 as the other ST3120022A drive, but with 8MiB of cache rather than 2MiB.
HD Tune
Despite the drive reporting itself to be in good condition, initial attempts at benchmarking were thwarted with a read error. Eventually, with a few attempts, it was possible to get it to run.
Throughput averaged 45MB/s, which is less than the 2MB cache version of the drive. The reason may be general drive-to-drive variations due to differences in platter-to-head matching resulting in fractionally lower densities. The profiles are not as clean as they could be, but the zones are clearly visible.
Similarly, I/O performance was consistent, with the caching showing a slight boost for writes in the extra tests.
CrystalDiskMark
The results from CDM generally show no significant differences between the two different cache versions.
ATTO
Likewise, the I/O performance on small blocks seems very similar as well.