Seagate Barracuda XT 2TB SATA 6G HD Review
Test System and IOMeter
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.
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Motherboard - Video Card - Memory - Audio - Hard Drives -
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Hardware Used: Intel Core i7 870 Asus P7P55D-Premium (P55 Express Chipset) GeForce GTX 280 6144MB Corsair DDR3-1333 CAS 7 Integrated on board Seagate Barracuda XT Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 WD RE4 |
Operating System - Chipset Drivers - DirectX - Video Drivers - |
Relevant Software: Windows Vista Ultimate Intel 9.1.0.1012 DirectX 10 NVIDIA ForceWare v182.50 Benchmarks Used: HD Tach 3.0.1.0 ATTO ver 2.02 CrystalDiskMark PCMark Vantage SiSoftware Sandra 2009 SP4a |
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In the following tables, we're showing two sets of access patterns; one with an 8K transfer size, 80% reads (20% writes) and 80% random (20% sequential) access and one with IOMeter's default access pattern of 2K transfers, 67% reads and 100% random access.
The Western Digital RE4 drive finished well ahead of the Seagate Barracuda XT in our IOMeter tests, regardless of whether or not it was connected to a SATA 6G controller. In fact, the Barracuda 7200.11 was also a bit faster than the XT overall in this test.
