Yesterday Seagate announced its transition to 1TB platters with its new 7200RPM-only Barracuda line. The move marked a significant change for Seagate as it is phasing out the Barracuda Green brand, and shifting the focus of the high-performance Barracuda XT. The Barracuda Green was a rebrand of Seagate's Barracuda LP, designed to convey the lower power consumption enabled by its 5900RPM spindle speed.
Seagate decided that the performance loss of moving to 5900RPM wasn't justified by the power savings. It believed that by introducing a more power efficient 7200RPM drive it could deliver the best of both worlds, negating the purpose of the Green line. For most desktops, Seagate has a point. The couple of watts you save by slowing down the motor aren't really realized in a system that idles at 60W and can consume over 100W under load. On the other hand, the performance drop is definitely noticeable. Hard drives have pretty bad random access performance to begin with, and slowing spindle speed isn't going to help:
Impact of Rotational Speed on Random Access Performance - Barracuda vs Green | ||||
7200RPM | 5900RPM | |||
4KB Random Write Performance (8GB LBA) | 1.20 MB/s | 0.90 MB/s |
There is a segment that Seagate isn't considering as it decides to axe the Green line: the home server market. If you're doing mass archival to some external storage, random performance is likely not a big concern. Instead, all you want is cheap, low-power storage.
Come February 2012, if you want a Green drive, you'll have to shop with Western Digital.
At the other end of the spectrum, the Barracuda XT has been Seagate's performance flagship. This brand isn't going away. Instead Seagate will introduce a solid state hybrid drive under the Barracuda XT banner at some point in the future.
Everything else now falls under the bare Barracuda label. High capacity drives should become more power efficient thanks to a reduction in the number of platters, and performance should go up thanks to increased platter density.
The new 1TB platter drives all carry the M001 suffix to their model numbers:
Seagate's 1TB-per-platter Barracuda Lineup | ||||
Model Number | Capacity | MSRP | ||
ST3000DM001 | 3TB | $179.99 | ||
ST2000DM001 | 2TB | $105.99 | ||
ST1500DM001 | 1.5TB | $83.99 | ||
ST1000DM003 | 1TB | $71.99 |
The Performance
With lower power consumption in mind, Seagate is now using a 40nm dual-core LSI controller on the 1TB-platter Barracudas. The chip is physically a lot smaller than what was used in the original 3TB Barracuda XT:Seagate continues to use 64MB of DDR2-800 as the Barracuda's DRAM cache.
The big news is obviously the platter count with the new 3TB Barracuda. While the previous drive used five platters, the new 3TB drive only uses three. It's this reduction that Seagate hopes will give it the performance and power advantages necessary to not only move the family forward, but render the outgoing Green redundant.
To find out, we threw some of our storage suite at the drive and compared it to the old Barracuda XT and Green drives. I also ripped the drive out of Seagate's 4TB GoFlex Desk enclosure, a 5-platter Barracuda XT, and included it in the comparisons.
Despite the sequential performance advantage, PCMark 7 showed the new Barracuda on-par with the Barracuda XT:
Final Words
The new 3TB Barracuda is a bit faster in sequential performance than the old Barracuda XT, at lower power consumption. In typical desktop workloads I think it's fairly safe to say that you wouldn't notice the difference between the Barracuda and Barracuda XT.As our SSD tests showed us however, when really pushed the new Barracuda performs somewhere in between the old Green and the XT. Seagate appears to have optimized the drive's behavior for lower power rather than peak performance. If you want the absolute best performance out of a 3.5" drive, stick with the XT or wait for the new hybrid version.
Given the tremendous advantage SSDs offer over even the fastest 3.5" drives, I'm personally ok with the performance tradeoff under very heavy load so long as you've got an SSD somewhere in your system as well. I'm not sure I particularly agree with Seagate's decision to abandon the 5900RPM drive market, but thankfully there are other options available if you want a high capacity, lower power drive.
.Source: http://www.anandtech.com
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