Can a 3TB 7,200RPM Drive Beat a 10,000RPM One? Seagate Thinks So

Performance Testing and Reviewer Experience

AIDA 64 v1.70


The AIDA64 benchmarks show various read tests on this drive and compare against all of the recent drives we’ve tested. We also included the old 2TB XT drive to compare as well. If you look at these tests you can see that the Barracuda XT 3TB basically performs on the same level as the Velociraptor 10K RPM 600GB drive. The Barracuda XT 3TB trades punches with the Velociraptor 600GB and in the buffered reads and linear reads. This looks promising for a 3TB 7200RPM drive against a 600GB 10,000 RPM drive. It also walks all over the Barracuda XT 2TB which means that Seagate has really improved their product to the point where it is actually a viable competitor.

Cinebench 11.5


In Cinebench, we notice more of the same. The Barracuda XT 3TB effectively beats almost every single drive in performance, and is also on par with the Western Digital Velociraptor drive both of which score a 6.04.



Once again, the Barracuda XT 3TB also outshines its 2TB predecessor by a decent margin considering how narrow the margins are in Cinebench to begin with.

HyperPi


In HyperPi the story continues, the Barracuda XT 3TB is one of the best performing drives out there and interestingly enough scores once again the exact same speeds as the Western Digital Velociraptor 600GB. This is also noting that these scores are actually an average of 3 tests. So, they effectively averaged out to the same score, which we found amusing but not surprising. And once again, the Barracuda XT 3TB blows right by the XT 2TB drive.

CrystalMark

In CrystalMark we take a look at both reads and writes of varying sizes as well as the sequential speeds. In the sequential speeds, the Velociraptor slightly out-edged the Barracuda XT 3TB by 2Mb/s  but when you realize that both drives are doing in excess of 160MB/s you realize that it barely a 1% difference. In sequential writes, though, the Seagate Barracuda XT 3TB pulls ahead of the Velociraptor showing 155.1MB/s over the Velociraptor’s 147.4MB/s this is an increase of almost 8MB/s over the Velociraptor showing over a 5% improvement over the WD drive.

In our 512K reads and writes, though, the Velociraptor reclaims the performance crown and bests the Barracuda XT 3TB by about 10%. The story is similar with the 4K reads as the Velociraptor once again beats out the Barracuda XT 3TB. And finally in the 4K writes, the Barracuda XT 3TB for some reason shows somewhat disappointing performance as it is not only bested by the Velociraptor by double, but is also beaten by the Barracuda XT 2TB its predecessor. We believe that this may be because Seagate sacrificed 4K write performance for the sake of everything else performing well.

ATTO Disk Benchmark


In ATTO, we see that the Seagate Barracuda XT 3TB shows solid performance regardless of the file size once it passes 32KB. This shows that the Barracuda XT is one of the best drives for large file sizes and for reading and writing of large media files such as music and movies.

Temperature and Noise

The Barracuda XT 3TB was one of our coolest and quietest desktop drives only bested by the Barracuda Green drive. This further reinforces that this would make a fantastic data drive for backing up data or simply being a drive to hold media.