Seagate Barracuda LP 2 TB [Review]

Reducing energy consumption has been gaining increasing importance and hard drive manufacturers, who had primarily been focusing on performance, have finally started manufacturing drives with power saving features. After Western Digital, now it is Seagate that has launched a 2TB desktop hard drive (ST32000542AS) with power saving features. Known as LP or low power, this drive boasts of lower power consumption by spinning at a lower RPM of 5,900, which also means that it will perform slower. We have this 4-platter drive with us and we will try to find out if the lower speed is too much of a compromise on performance.

Features

This drive boasts of a huge 2 TB capacity. For a home user, this should be enough to dump most of your games, movies, songs and data on it. It features the perpendicular magnetic recording technology that enables better areal density in this drive. The huge 32 MB buffer means an uninterrupted data transfer, and the rather unconventional 5,900 RPM should provide a performance somewhere in between the conventional 5,400 RPM and 7,200 RPM hard drives.

The drive looks like any other internal hard drive from Seagate. If you look at the right side of the SATA connector, you will notice that there is a jumper setting present to let you set the drive to the older SATA-I mode for backward compatibility with older motherboards that do not support SATA-II. The drive doesn't come with a jumper, but it is not difficult to get one. Without the jumper put in, the drive operates in the SATA-II mode.

Only a small part of the drive electronics is exposed from below

The areal density of this four-platter drive is 500 MB per platter. This should therefore sport better access times as well as an improved transfer speeds.

Seagate claims that this drive consumes less than 5.5 (5) W during idle, which is less power as compared to its predecessors, thus enabling system integrators to build lower powered systems. The drive also features Adaptive Fly Height that maintains the distance of the head from the platter, resulting in consistent read/write performance. To maintain a silent operation, the drive features motor with Seagate SoftSonic technology, which reduces noise.

Let's move to the performance of the drive.

Performance

We connected this drive to our test rig's SATA port to put it through our tailor-made test process. The properties of the drive in Windows Explorer show up the capacity as 1.81 TB.

We used benchmarking tools such as H2Bench, HDTach, HD Tune, and SiSoftware SANDRA.

H2Bench is a low-level hard drive testing utility and gives an indication of the raw performance of the drive. The drive was not formatted while we conducted this test; it did not hold any file system. The drive returned a score of 226.3 MB/s in the "core test", which is one of the highest we have seen so far. We also measured the access times for the whole disk, and found them to be 12.49 ms for reading and 7.13 ms for writing.

HDTach RW 3.0.1.0 is yet another low-level test that does not require the hard drive to have a file system.

These are some of the highest read and write speeds we have ever measured during the start of the test.

HD Tune Pro 3.00 is a hard disk benchmarking utility capable of performing lower-level as well as file system benchmarks and displaying the result in the form of a graph. We ran the read as well as the write test to measure the transfer speeds, burst speeds, and access time across the entire drive and obtained the results as in the figure.

The results of the HD Tune Pro 3.00 Read Benchmark

And of the Write Benchmark

HD Tune File Benchmark

Note that the temperature of the drive was hovering near 33 - 36 degrees Celsius, which is not high, considering that the room was not cooled.

The File Copy Test: In the real-world copy test, we created a 1 GB RAM drive using Farstone Virtual Hard Drive Pro and used this as a host drive for testing the read and write speeds of the Barracuda. This eliminates the need to have a faster host drive and gives the absolute best scores possible by the drive being tested.

We also copied 4 GB of assorted as well as sequential data from one partition of the drive to another to see the internal transfer rate. The results of the file copy test went thus:

4 GB assorted intra-drive: 128 sec (32.00 MB/s)
4 GB sequential intra-drive: 125 sec (32.77 MB/s)

Power consumption: We have also tested the power consumption of the drive as this is becoming an increasingly important parameter in today's world of Green computing. We took the power readings before connecting the drive, after connecting it in the idle state, and while data was transferred internally from one partition to another so that only this particular drive consumes power and not the host drive. We found that it consumed up to 5 W in idle state, while the power consumption increased to 12 W when the drive was transferring data internally.

The Verdict

The Seagate Barracuda LP 2TB is a good performer when you think about it from a practical point of view, but the benchmarks show that it doesn't match up to most of the other desktop hard drives we have tested recently. All this can only be attributed to the lower 5,900 RPM, which is the way the drive saves power. The drive is exceptionally silent and cool while in use. The huge 2 TB space takes care of all your storage needs. The drive is suitable for use in HTPCs as well as external storage cases, in addition to desktops.

With the electronics giants opting to go the Green (eco-friendly) way, Seagate has also done its bit. The lower power consumption is one of those improvements. Also, 70% of the material used to manufacture this hard drive is recycled. With a 5-year warranty, this drive is priced at Rs.16,700 + VAT, which is atrociously high when compared to the WD 2TB drive, which is 2000 rupees less expensive.