There’s an irony that we have to resort to using the HD Tach burst speed results as this is a figure that we stopped using in our reviews of SSD drives. The fastest SSDs have a burst speed of 250MB/s. The slower 128GB Kingston SSDNow V has a burst speed of a mere 125MB/s yet it is no slouch. We have previously concluded that burst speed gives little indication about the ultimate performance of a drive yet this is exactly where Sata 3.0 has an effect with the Barracuda XT.
Iometer Results
With SSD Data
Without SSD Data
I/O Operations per Second
Longer bars are better
Strip out the 6Gb/s feature and the underlying performance of the Barracuda XT puts it head-to-head with the Hitachi Ultrastar. This makes the Seagate look rather expensive and relatively unattractive.
But if a 7200rpm hard drive seems to be incapable of stretching Sata 2.0 to the limit, SSD is a different story and we are keen to see the first solid-state drive with a Sata 3.0 interface.
Verdict
Seagate’s Barracuda XT may be the first hard drive to use the new 6Gb/s Sata 3.0 interface, but the new technology doesn’t deliver any obvious benefit. Two terabytes of storage is welcome, but Seagate is charging a very high price. There are cheaper - and more quiet - drives out there. ®
More HDD Reviews...
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Hitachi Ultrastar A7K2000 |
WD Caviar Black |
WD Caviar Green |
Seagate Barracuda XT 2TB Sata 3.0 HDD
COMMENTS
@Reg: Tested on 2009-12-16?
If your machine's date is right, you've been sitting on this test for exactly 4 weeks before releasing it?
Request from the vendor?
Care to explain?
Years
"it'll be years before high capacity spinning drives will be able to take advantage of SATA 3.0, RAID or not"
Not really, the next doubling of density of the disk surface should push us into SATA3.0 realms.
@Ivon
"How did you fit a i7 940 chip LGA1366 on a P55A motherboard LGA1156."
It's simple. You buy the LGA1156 version of the i7 940 chip.
Ivon the Terrible
How did you fit a i7 940 chip LGA1366 on a P55A motherboard LGA1156. Heavy use of the scissors?
No advantage for a RAID
"""Sticking 4 of these in a RAID array could make for some impressive speed increases."""
Actually, you're looking at either A) The exact speed increase for using the same number of drives with SATA 2.0 or B) Going to saturate your controller. Drives don't share the 3 or 6 gbit speed, they each get that much bandwidth, so as long as your drives don't saturate SATA 2.0 (Which we can see that they do not,) you'll get no speed boost from 3.0. As an example, my 5 drive software raid 5, running on my (crappy) nvidia onboard SATA 2.0 ports can easily do sequential read and write at above 300MB/s, and that's with 2 year old drives.
So to sum up: it'll be years before high capacity spinning drives will be able to take advantage of SATA 3.0, RAID or not.
