discussion Seagate Barracuda XT 3TB Hard Drive Review

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Real World Data Transfers

Real World Data Transfers

No matter how good a synthetic benchmark like IOMeter or PCMark is, it can not really tell you how your hard drive will perform in “real world” situations. All of us here at Hardware Canucks strive to give you the best, most complete picture of a review item’s true capabilities and to this end we will be running timed data transfers to give you a general idea of how its performance relates to real life use. To help replicate worse case scenarios we will transfer a 10.00GB contiguous RAR file and a folder containing 490 subfolders with a total 21,080 files varying in length from 20mb to 1kb (10.00 GB total).

Testing will include transfer to and transferring from the devices, using MS RichCopy and logging the performance of the drive. Here is what we found.

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The large file performance of this drive is everything we though it would be based on synthetic benchmark results; namely it is a down right speed demon. Also on the positive side, while the small file performance was very respectable.

 

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Vista Start Up / Adobe CS5 Load Time

Vista Start Up

When it comes to hard drive performance there is one area that even the most oblivious user notices: how long it takes to load the Operating System. While all the other tests were run with a Windows 7 operating system, this particular test uses another older test bed's “day to day” OS (copied over to our new testbed) which has accumulated a lot of crud over the months from installs and removals. We chose the Anti-Virus splash screen as our finish line as it is the last program to be loaded on start up.

While it was not able to place first, a second place finish coupled with the fact that it will stay fast a heck of a lot longer than the “winner” means that this drive is going to make a huge difference in many systems. Color us impressed.

Adobe CS5 Load Time

Photoshop is a notoriously slow loading program under the best of circumstances, and while the latest version is actually pretty decent, when you add in a bunch of extra brushes and the such you get a really great torture test which can bring even the best of the best to their knees. Let’s see how our review unit faired in the Adobe crucible!

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As expected, the Adobe test just proves how fast the Barracuda really is. It may be slightly slower at ultra small files, but its high end results do help balance this off. The end result is you get a drive which has huge capacity yet its speed belies its massive footprint.

 

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Conclusion

Conclusion

In the world of high performance 3TB hard drives, there is no denying the Seagate Barracuda XT 3TB is currently king of the hill. What we have here is a cutting edge hard drive that offers massive capacity numbers alongside some truly impressive benchmark numbers. This level of excellence does come at a price though.

Let’s start with the positives since they vastly outweigh the minor speed bumps rear their heads when running on the bleeding edge of modern HDD technology. When compared against SSDs, the Barracuda doesn’t stand a chance in terms of overall performance but it absolutely demolishes solid state storage in price per GB and considering recent SSD RMA rates, possibly longevity as well. That’s not to say that Seagate’s flagship drive isn’t a slouch when the rubber meets the road. As we saw, it is fully capable of running circles around the competition’s current 3TB solution and handily beating other spindle-based drives in the majority of real world tests. Whether or not this remains true once Western Digital gets around to releasing the Black 3TB is anyone’s guess but for the time being, this Barracuda is as good as it gets.

Since the Barracuda relies on a five platter design, there are some limitations to its performance. On the surface of things it is hard to recommend the Seagate Barracuda XT 3TB as cheaper drives are just as fast in an OS environment. Access times are also a step back from previous flagship drives. However, in real world testing things are much closer than any synthetic benchmark numbers would have you believe.

Price is always something which seems to come back and takes a good bite out of any recommendation for high capacity drives. The situation with the XT 3TB is no different from a capacity perspective since two 1.5TB drives can easily be bought for under $215 these days. But perspective is key since we haven’t tested a drive that can come close to the Barracuda’s absolutely wicked minimum and average read / write numbers. At $240, we actually believe it is a pretty decent value from a number of perspectives.

Until retail market solid state drives come down in price and prove their useful lifespan can be counted in years rather than months, we will continue to push standard hard drives as a primary means of digital storage. Currently, there are plenty of products in this market vying for your attention but the Seagate Barracuda XT 3TB has the performance, capacity and technological force to put it out front of nearly every other drive available.


Pros:

- 3TB of space
- Great sequential read and write speeds
- Insanely good minimum write performance
- Very good real world performance
- Five year warranty


Cons:

- Lower small file performance than the competition
- Five platter design
- Price premium associated with its huge capacity
- Relies on software for overcoming MBR limitations on older operating systems

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