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| Introduction | ||||||||||||||||
When we reviewed our first 3TB hard drive almost a year ago, the market wasn't quite ready for the huge storage capacity being made available. Fully compatible motherboards featuring the unified extensible firmware interface (UEFI) were still months away, and having to use a separate host bus adapter (HBA) card was inconvenient and added extra cost. But a year brings a lot of changes to the technology landscape. UEFI-equipped boards are prevalent, starting with P67 based products and spreading to the latest Intel Z68 chipset as well. Many of AMD's 990FX motherboards also sport UEFI. If you're building a new system any time soon, we've got good news for you. Chances are your mainboard will natively support high capacity hard drives out of the box, without the need for an HBA card. ;) Western Digital AV-GP, Caviar Green, Hitachi Deskstar, and Seagate Barracuda XT If you're currently in the market for a large capacity hard drive, you've come to the right place. Today we take a look at four of the latest 3TB drives to hit the market, from Hitachi, Seagate, and Western Digital. Although each HDD offers the same amount of storage, there are some distinct differences between them. Read on to find out what separates these products from one another, and then you can examine the performance numbers we recorded from each drive after running them through our benchmark gauntlet.
As expected, prices are coming down on 3TB drives. A year ago, the Caviar Green sold for $239, and now it runs for only $149. Every drive in our round-up is well under $200, so prices are within reach for many consumers. And whenever the next milestone in HDD storage capacity is reached, we would expect to see these drives around the $100 mark like many 2TB are currently. Before we get to the raw performance numbers, let's take a quick look at each product and find out makes them unique. |
| Hitachi Deskstar 3TB | ||||||||||||||||||||
How does the Hitachi Deskstar 3TB differ from the competition? The Deskstar features a relatively fast rotational speed of 7200 RPM, along with a 64MB memory buffer. Granted, the Barracuda XT also sports a 7200 RPM spindle speed, but the Hitachi drive should outperform Western Digital's offerings. Its 3 year limited warranty is on par with the industry standard, but at a retail price of $179 finds it tied for the most expensive drive in our round-up, along with the Barracuda XT. We look forward to finding out if the performance numbers can justify its price premium over the competition.
After a quick format, the drive shows up with 2.72 TiB of free space. With that much capacity in your system, it should take quite a while before needing additional storage. ;) |
| Seagate Barracuda XT 3TB | ||||||||||||||||||||
How does the Seagate Barracuda XT differ from the competition? In terms of its specifications, the Barracuda XT measures up against the Hitachi Deskstar almost identically. Both drives feature a SATA 6.0Gb/s interface, 7200 RPM, 64MB cache, and a price of $179. The difference is Seagate's industry leading 5 year warranty. Both Hitachi and Western Digital only offer 3 years.
There is 2.72 TiB of capacity after installing and formatting the Barracuda XT drive. This is the same amount of useable space we saw from Hitachi's Deskstar, obviously.
;) |
| Western Digital AV-GP 3TB | ||||||||||||||||||||
How does the Western Digital AV-GP differ from the competition? This particular WD drive offers SATA 3.0Gb/s in comparison to the 6.0Gb/s interface found on the other three drives. It shouldn't matter though, as none of the products in this article can come close to hitting the maximum throughput of a SATA 3.0Gb/s connection. WD doesn't specify the spindle speeds of their Green hard drives, but expect a speed closer to 5400RPM than the 7200RPM of the other drives features here.
Western Digital's AV-GP continues the trend and features 2.72 TiB of storage space after installation and a quick format.
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| Western Digital Caviar Green 3TB | ||||||||||||||||||||
How does the Western Digital Caviar Green differ from the competition? The Caviar Green is similar to the AV-GP in many ways, but features a SATA 6.0Gp/s interface. And at $149, it is the most affordable drive in our round-up. It's $5 less than the AV-GP, and $30 less than the Hitachi Deskstar and Seagate Barracuda XT. But it's worth noting that Hitachi does make a 5400 RPM 3TB drive that retails for $129, which makes it the least expensive on the market--we just didn't have one on hand for testing.
Along with the other drives, the Caviar Green offers you 2.72 TiB of storage after formatting. We didn't expect to see a capacity difference between the drives, but still wanted to verify. As it turns out, every drive we tested provides the same amount of usable space.
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| Test System and ATTO | ||||||||||||
Our Test Methodologies: Under each test condition, the drives tested here were installed as secondary volumes in our testbed, with a different hard disk used for the OS and benchmark installations. The drives were left blank without partitions wherever possible, unless a test required them to be partitioned and formatted, as was the case with our ATTO and PCMark 7 benchmark tests. Windows firewall, automatic updates and screen savers were all disabled before testing. In all test runs, we rebooted the system and waited several minutes for drive activity to settle before invoking a test.
ATTO is a disk benchmark that measures transfers across a specific volume length. It measures raw transfer rates for both reads and writes and graphs them out in an easily interpreted chart. We chose .5kb through 8192kb transfer sizes over a total max volume length of 256MB. This test was performed on blank, formatted drives with NTFS partitions.  
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| SiSoft SANDRA 2011 | ||||
Testing continues with SiSoftware's SANDRA XII, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. Here, we used the Physical Disk test suite and provided the results from our comparison drives. The benchmarks were run without formatting and read/write performance metrics are detailed below.
 With SANDRA's physical disk benchmark, we find the 3TB Hitachi Deskstar offers the highest write performance at 128.77 MB/s. Seagate's drive edges out the Deskstar with read speed at 123.3 MB/s. Both Western Digital drives offer almost identical performance, but the AV-GP does show a tiny lead over the Caviar Green. |
| CrystalDiskMark Testing | ||||
CrystalDiskMark is a synthetic test that evaluates both sequential as well as random small and large file transfers. It does a nice job of providing a quick look at best and worst case scenarios with regard to hard drive performance, best case being large sequential transfers and worse case being small, random 4K transfers.
Seagate's Barracuda XT was impressive throughout CrystalDiskMark testing. It consistently finished ahead of the group in both read and write performance. We expected the Hitachi Deskstar to keep pace since it features similar specs as the Barracuda XT, but that wasn't the case here. It actually trailed Western Digital's AV-GP drive in a few tests. |
| HDTune Results | ||||
EFD Software's HD Tune is described on the company's web site as such: "HD Tune is a hard disk utility with many functions. It can be used to measure the drive's performance, scan for errors, check the health status (S.M.A.R.T.), securely erase all data and much more." The latest version of the benchmark added temperature statistics and improved support for SSDs, among a few other updates and fixes.
HDTune results show the Barracuda XT holds a small performance advantage over the Deskstar in average transfer rate. But the Hitachi drive offers better access times, with a more significant performance advantage in read access. |
| PCMark 7 Testing | ||||
We really like PCMark 7's Secondary Storage benchmark module for its pseudo real-world application measurement approach to testing. PCMark 7 offers a trace-based measurement of system response times under various scripted workloads of traditional client / desktop system operation. From simple application start-up performance, to data streaming from a drive in a game engine, and video editing with Windows Movie Maker, we feel more comfortable that these tests reasonably illustrate the performance profile of hard drives in an end-user / consumer PC usage model, moreso than a purely synthetic transfer test.
We've seen the Hitachi Deskstar and Seagate Barracuda XT trade places at the top spot of our performance graphs, but here we find the Deskstar leading the way with an overall score of 2317 in PCMark 7. The Barracuda XT is not far behind at 2257 PCMarks. |
| Performance Summary and Conclusion | ||||
Performance Summary: With all the numbers in, let's take a high level view of performance. After running a total of 28 tests on each drive, the one that stood out from the pack was Seagate's 3TB Barracuda XT. It led the group in about half of the tests, and usually trailed the top spot by a small margin in the other half. But the Hitachi drive was no slouch either. We saw the Deskstar outperform Seagate's drive in most of the PCMark 7 tests,while offering the fastest access time during the HDTune benchmark. On the other hand, both Western Digital drives gave a solid showing throughout, trailing the competition by a small margin, despite having the lowest prices. 
As we explained earlier, Seagate's Barracuda XT offers consumers the best performance currently from a 3TB hard drive. It didn't land a clean sweep of all tests, but the drive owned the top spot the majority of the time. Of course, the tables are turned when considering cost. Yes, Western Digital's Caviar Green was usually the slowest drive in our tests, but it was also the most affordable at only $149. That's a $30 savings over both the Barracuda XT and Deskstar 3TB drives. Ultimately, it's up to consumers to decide if the performance edge offered by Seagate's drive is worth the price premium. We tend to lean towards performance results when making a recommendation with such a relatively small price difference. In this case, it's rather clear which drive delivers the goods. And with a 5 year warranty, where the competition only offers 3 years, we highly recommend Seagate's Barracuda XT 3TB hard drive for your next storage upgrade. |
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Using September 2011 street prices, we calculated a cost-per-GB for each of the hard drives in this article utilizing their formatted capacity in gigabytes. The results show a tight grouping, as the cost-per-GB for the drives ranges from $0.05-per-GB for the WD Caviar Green, up to $0.07-per-GB for the Hitachi Deskstar and Seagate Barracuda XT drives. It's not a surprise that the more expensive drives own a performance advantage over less expensive models. But for budget conscious consumers, the $25 to $30 cost savings offered by Western Digital's models might be worth the performance sacrifice, especially when purchasing multiple drives. ;)
