Seagate Barracuda Green 2TB Hard Drive Review

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 Vantage 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.

HotHardware Test System Intel Core i7 Powered

ATTO Disk Benchmark - Read/Write Performance Version 2.41

ATTO is a more straight-forward type of 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.

Seagate Barracuda Green	Western Digital Caviar Green 3TB
Western Digital RE4	Seagate Barracuda XT 3Gb/s

ATTO reveals the performance edge the Barracuda Green has over the Caviar Green drive in write speeds (126 MB/s vs 106 MB/s). Read speeds are very close though, as the WD product held a slight edge. Overall, we'll give Seagate's drive the edge in this benchmark though, all things considered.