Seagate Barracuda Green 2TB Hard Drive Review
PCMark Vantage
Next we ran the four drives through a battery of tests in PCMark Vantage from Futuremark Corp. We specifically used only the HDD Test module of this benchmark suite to evaluate all of the drives we tested. Feel free to consult Futuremark's white paper on PCMark Vantage for an understanding of what each test component entails and how it calculates its measurements. For specific information on how the HDD Test module arrives at its performance measurements, we'd encourage you to read pages 35 and 36 of the white paper.
We really like PCMark Vantage's HDD Performance for its real-world application measurement approach to testing. From simple Windows Vista start-up performance to data streaming from a disk drive in a game engine and video editing with Windows Movie Maker, we feel confident that these tests best illustrate the real performance profile of our hard drives in an end user/consumer PC usage model. Futuremark's PCMark Vantage simulates a range of real-world scenarios and workloads, stressing various system subsets in the process. Everything you'd want to do with your PC -- watching HD movies, music compression, image editing, gaming, and so forth -- is represented here, and most of the tests are multi-threaded, making this a good indicator of all-around performance.
Real World System Performance PP
PCMark Vantage
To the naked eye, you wouldn't be able to tell the performance difference between the Barracuda Green and Caviar Green drives during these tests. But the benchmark tells us that Seagate's drive is slightly faster in 3 out of 4 tests when compared to WD's Green drive. Of course, the RE4 and Barracuda XT outperform both.
