Seagate Barracuda ES.2 1TB Hard Drive
For testing the 1TB Barracuda ES.2 SATA HDD, we used an Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 (2.13GHz) on an Abit Fatal1ty FP-IN9 SLI motherboard. We also used 2GB of Corsair DDR2 (TWIN2X1024A-5400UL) and a 120GB Maxtor SATA hard drive as the main system drive. The 1TB Barracuda ES.2 was compared to a 750GB Seagate 7200.10, a 750GB Western Digital Caviar SE16, a 500GB Western Digital Caviar SE16, and a 74GB Western Digital Raptor.
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Motherboard - Video Card - Memory - Audio - Hard Drives -
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Hardware Used: Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 (2.13GHz) Abit Fatal1ty FP-IN9 SLI nForce 650i SLI chipset ATI Radeon HD 3850 2048MB Corsair XMS2 DDR2-675MHz CAS 4 Integrated on board Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 120GB - 7,200RPM - SATA 1.5Gb/s Seagate Barracuda ES.2 1TB - 7,200RPM - SATA 3Gb/s Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 750GB - 7,200RPM - SATA 3Gb/s Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD5000KS 500GB - 7,200RPM - SATA 3Gb/s Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD7500AAKS 750GB - 7,200RPM - SATA 3Gb/s Western Digital Raptor 74GB 74GB - 10,000RPM - SATA 1.5Gb/s |
Operating System - Chipset Drivers - DirectX - Video Drivers - |
Relevant Software: Windows Vista nForce Drivers v8.43 DirectX 10 ATI Catalyst v7.11 Benchmarks Used: HD Tach 3.0.1.0 HD Tune 2.54 PCMark Vantage SiSoftware Sandra XII SP1 |
We began our testing with Simpli Software's HD Tach, which is described on the company's web site as such: "HD Tach is a low level hardware benchmark for random access read/write storage devices such as hard drives, removable drives (ZIP/JAZZ), flash devices, and RAID arrays. HD Tach uses custom device drivers and other low level Windows interfaces to bypass as many layers of software as possible and get as close to the physical performance of the device possible."
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Amongst the 7,200 RPM drives, the Barracuda ES.2 dominates in the HD Tach tests, especially the Average Read test. From our previous testing in Windows XP, the 750GB Western Digital Caviar SE16 proved to be an awesome performer, and we were wondering what drive may dethrone it. It looks like the Barracuda ES.2 might be that drive. Although the Barracuda ES.2 couldn't quite reach the write performance or Random Access Time of the 10,000 RPM 74GB Raptor, it did outperform it in the Average Read test by over 20 MB/s.
