Although Hard Disk Drive, aka HDD, is not the speed champion in the storage market anymore, its higher capacity and cheaper price still allow HDD to stay alongside much faster Solid-State Drives. In this review, we are taking a look at the Seagate BarraCuda 1 TB HDD.
Specifications
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Unboxing
The packaging of the HDD may change depending on your locations and resellers. The front of the box has a Seagate logo on top and a photo of the internals of a hard drive.
There are both Seagate and Synnex (warranty provider in Hong Kong) service hotlines at the back, in case you need any technical support.
Not much are shown on the sides of the box. At the bottom, a sticker indicating both the model number and serial number is found.
As with any other HDD manufacturers, the Segate BarraCuda 1TB is also protected by an anti-static bag, sitting securely on a plastic tray.
Seagate BarraCuda 1 TB HDD
The front of the HDD gives you all the necessary information about the drive, including the model name, capacity and country of origin. Multiple safety and regulatory labels are printed on the front as well.
Standard 3.5-inch hard drive mounting holes can be located at the sides of the drive.
A green PCB is at the back of the drive, which houses all the drive’s controller and the 64 MB of cache. The SATA 3 connector provides up to 6 Gbps of total bandwidth to the HDD.
Review
Testing Methodology
To test the performance of the solid-state drive, we use three well-established storage benchmarking software. They are CrystalDiskMark, ATTO Disk Benchmark, as well as AS SSD Benchmark.
CrystalDiskMark can measure both sequential and random 4KB read/write speeds with a queue depth of 32. ATTO Disk Benchmark can test how the drive performs across different transfer block sizes, mostly in a sequential environment. AS SSD Benchmark can provide both normal read/write speed and the IOPS performance of the drive.
- CPU: Intel Core i5-8400 @ 2.9 GHz (65W TDP)
- Motherboard: ASRock Z370 Killer SLI
Performance
In the CrystalDiskMark test, the BarraCuda HDD performed reasonably well in terms of sequential read and write . It reached speed of up to 202.6 MB/s for read and 191.8 MB/s for write. However, the drive fell short in random 4K operations, at less than 2 MB/s.
The results are pretty much the same with AS SSD benchmark. The sequential speeds were similar at around 185 MB/s, while 4K random speeds topped at 1.45 MB/s.
The BarraCuda HDD got at most 372 IOPS and a score of 52 in our testing. IOPS determines how a storage device deals with small capacity but large volume files. For reference, a SATA SSD can have IOPS from 50,000 to over 200,000, which is about 125 times higher.
In ATTO Disk Benchmark, the HDD achieved the advertised speed, when the file size increased from 4 KB. The drive has a maximum read and write speed of about 203 MB/s and 198 MB/s respectively.
As expected, the BarraCuda HDD or any mechanical HDDs would not do as well as SSDs when handling random small data. When compared with the famous Western Digital Blue 1 TB HDD (its review here), the BarraCuda does fairly good with slightly faster read and write performance.
Conclusion
The Seagate BarraCuda 1TB HDD performs reasonably well when compared with traditional spinning hard drives. The sequential speeds can average at about 200 MB/s, but drop significantly in random operations.
The hard drive comes with a 2-year warranty, with rated workload limit of 55 TB per year. The drive should be durable enough for the average consumers. I would still recommend using a SSD for the OS drive, because of the faster random speeds. The BarraCuda 1TB HDD has a MSRP of $49.98 USD, and only costs around $44 USD at the time of this review. There are different capacity options for you to choose, from 500 GB up to 8 TB.
You can purchase the HDD from your local/online resellers or the links below from Amazon and Newegg.
- Amazon US: Seagate BarraCuda 1 TB HDD (ST1000DM010)
- Newegg US: Seagate BarraCuda 1 TB HDD (ST1000DM010)
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