Seagate Barracuda 3000GB Review

Storage used to be a one-sided affair for the desktop with spindle-based mechanical drives as the star of the show but now that SSD’s are quickly establishing themselves, its making it harder for mechanical drives to differentiate themselves from each other. One thing that SSD’s have yet to be proud of is their capacities, we’ve grown far from the day of the 40-80GB IDE hard disks with data ballooning to what it is today and demands to store these data are growing. Enter Seagate’s newest large capacity offering, the Seagate Barracuda 3TB. We’ve reviewed Seagate’s earlier 3TB offering, the Barracuda XT 3TB a while back so we’re interested to see what it’s younger and fresher brother can offer. Let’s get our drives spinning and make this showy!

As we’ve mentioned we’ve already looked at an earlier release from Seagate in the form of the Barracuda XT 3TB. Now while the Barracuda 3TB we have here doesn’t have the XT designation, don’t let it fool you, the Barracuda is a high-performance line and this new model is no exception.

The Barracuda 3TB is the first ever 1TB-per-platter 3TB drive (there are other products out there using 1TB-per-platter but only come in 1TB capacities.) So what does this mean for the you, the user? Well first off, you get better efficiency and faster access times since the large areal density means the read/write arms don’t have to move that far to access the next piece of data on the platter. Less movement means faster access which leads to better performance. So let’s get a picture of how this drive stacks up against its brother and we’ll be putting it against our simultaneous review release, the Kingston HyperX SSD 120GB.