Seagate Barracuda XT 3TB Review

Testing:

Testing of hard drives can be done in a couple different ways. One is to leave the drive bare and hook it up as a secondary drive in an already existing system so that you can see the theoretical peaks in performance followed by a cleaning of the drive after each benchmark run through. The second method, and the one OverclockersClub employs, is to load the operating system and benchmarking suite onto the drive being tested. This more closely emulates how the drive will be used so that the performance results are real world, not simply best case scenario results that you may never see unless operating the drive as a bare drive. Testing will be completed with the P67-based system listed below with a fresh install of Windows 7 Professional 64-bit updated to SP1 and fully patched as of the date of the testing. The latest Intel Rapid Storage technology drivers and software have been installed for this testing, with all tests run on the native SATA 6Gb/s ports on the P67-based motherboard. The connection to the drive from the motherboard is with a 6Gb/s SATA cable. This drive was tested on the platform listed below and was formatted using a GUID Partition Table to take advantage of the entire drive capacity for testing.

Testing Setup:

• Processors: Core i7 2600K @ 3.4GHz 100 x 34
• Motherboard: ASUS Maximus IV Extreme
• Memory: Mushkin 996805 Redline PC312800 6-8-6-24 1600MHz 4GB
• Video Card: Sapphire Radeon HD5870
• Power Supply: Mushkin 1000W Joule Modular power supply
• Hard Drive: 1 x Seagate 1TB SATA
• Optical Drive: Lite-On Blu-Ray
• Case: Cooler Master HAF 932
• OS: Windows 7 Professional 64-bit

Comparison Drives:

• Seagate Barracuda XT 2TB
• Seagate Barracuda XT 1.5TB
• Seagate Barracuda XT 1TB
• Mushkin Io 128GB SSD

Benchmarks:

• Drive Tests:

1. HD Tune 3.50 Pro
2. HD Tach
3. SiSoft Sandra 2009
4. Crystal Disk Mark
5. ATTO Disk Benchmark
6. AS SSD
7. I/O Meter
8. PCMark Vantage
9. Windows Startup / Shutdown