Seagate 2TB Hard Drives Test Drive
The problem with being in IT is that its very hard during the holidays to get what you want. I’m sure there are some readers the last thing you would want is more IT stuff, but for many of the readers I talk to 5TB’s of storage is just not enough. So if your like me and you end up getting a gift card from Fry’s for the holidays then I suggest taking a look at some of the items we have been reviewing in the Storage Switzerland Labs.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
First there is the core of all storage, the hard drive itself. We recently tested the Seagate Barracuda XT 2TB drive and the Seagate Barracuda LP 2TB drive. The XT is designed for primary storage in your desktop or server while the LP is designed for a desktop where performance doesn’t matter as much or as backup storage.
The Seagate Barracuda XT is fast, very fast. This SATA, 6Gbps hard drive doubles the bandwidth from the prior model and leverages 64MB of cache, delivering up to 600 MB/s in performance. The SATA 6Gbps interface is backward compatible to the prior generation and you can use the drive on older systems without issues. As is my practice I did not do specific performance testing, I wanted to see if my system “felt” faster and it did indeed. In addition to doubling my current desktop capacity it also made it feel significantly faster. For many desktop tasks I would be hard pressed to notice a difference between this drive and a solid state disk drive.
The Seagate Barracuda LP on the other hand has a different goal in mind, to save power and reduce noise level. Both of which it does well. We used it as a backup target for several backup tests we have going. We found that in all our tests it spun up and down rather quickly during the backup process yet still maintained solid performance. Low power does not mean low performance and for users that don’t need to have the fastest storage performance these drives are fine as a primary storage device.
For a desktop it might in fact be the preferred device for users looking for a quite work environment. Obviously the drive is quite while it is spun down, but even more impressive is how quite it is even while in use. Compared to the similar offering by Western Digital, we found the Seagate drive to be significantly more noise friendly.
From a reliability standpoint we have had both drives for over 30 days and have seen no issue with either drive. We’ll keep beating on them over the next few months and provide continued updates on their progress.
George Crump, Senior Analyst
Briefing Report
