Going Green in Heart and Mind: Seagate Barracuda 2TB

Testing

For this review, we used our hard drive testing bench system:
 

• GigaByte GA-X58A-UD5 Rev2 Motherboard [Provided by Gigabyte]
• Intel Core-i7 i975 Extreme Edition [Provided by Intel]
• 6GB Kingston HyperX T1 DDR3 RAM @ 1333MHz [Provided by Kingston]
• Coolermaster UCP 1100W PSU [Provided by Coolermaster]
• Kingston 128GB V Series SSD [Provided by Kingston]
• 600GB Western Digital Velociraptor [Provided by Western Digital]
• 750GB Western Digital Scorpio Black [Provided by Western Digital]
• 750GB Seagate Momentus [Provided by Seagate]
• 2TB Seagate Barracuda XT [Provided by Seagate]
• 2TB Seagate Barracuda Green [Provided by Seagate]
• 3TB Seagate Barracuda XT [Provided by Seagate]
• 3TB Western Digital Green [Provided by Western Digital]

As you can see, we've combined two top-performing notebook drives alongside a battery of conventional 3.5" drives to give you a decent comparison of just how fast or slow can green drives perform.


AIDA 64 (64KB)


When testing AIDA 64, we took all of our recent HDD testing data and compiled all of them into one chart. This resulted in quite a bit of comparison data and may seem a little busy to some. Nevertheless, it should be a fairly good illustration of the strengths and weaknesses of the Barracuda Green drive. In our tests, we found that the Barracuda Green was actually the 3rd fastest drive when it came to linear reads, faster even than Barracuda XT TB and the Western Digital Green 3TB. This is a very welcome and surprising result as both of those drives should be faster than the Barracuda Green. Although, once we go to random reads, all of a sudden the Barracuda Green drops to dead last out of our seven HDDs. This fact is a little concerning considering how good its linear
reads were. As far as buffered reads went, it was one of the fastest drives out there and that is likely due to the fact that it has 64MB of cache that assists the buffered read. Once we take a look at the average read access times (in milliseconds) we notice that the Barracuda Green finds itself towards the middle of the pack at 16.63ms which isn’t too great at all but still better than two of the Barracuda XT drives we tested.

Cinebench CPU


Cinebench R11.5 itself is actually a CPU and GPU scaling benchmark application, but what we do is run Cinebench off of the tested HDD. As a result, the program’s performance will vary depending on how quickly it can draw from the 11,000 little files that it needs in order to render and therefore generate a score. So, for this test, we were able to discern which drives would perform best when running a certain program off of the hard drive. Once again, the Seagate Barracuda Green performed towards the middle of the pack, Not necessarily performing at the bottom nor at the top. With a score of 6.02 it scored better than the 750GB Momentus (6.01), Barracuda XT 2TB (6.0), and the WD Green 3TB (6.0). All other drives still performed marginally better, but considering that Cinebench is only about 30 seconds long, there’s a good chance that the small performance margin over time could manifest itself as much more lost productivity.

HyperPi


With HyperPi we were attempting to achieve the same kinds of results as Cinebench but being more memory intensive rather than directly CPU intensive. This means that the data will have to be pulled from the drive and then go through the CPU to memory and whichever drive is faster should in theory result in a lower (better) time. In this test, the Barracuda Green actually performed quite well and found itself again in the top 3 and
once again outperforming the Western Digital 3TB drive. The only drives that outperform this green drive are the Barracuda XT 3TB and the 10,000RPM (almost 2x as fast spinning) Velociraptor 600GB.