Seagate Barracuda XT 6 Gbps Hard Drive Review

Test Setup

I wanted to find out a few things in regards to Barracuda XT’s performance:

• Does it really benefit from 6 Gbps SATA 3.0? How does performance change when connected via regular 3 GBps SATA II?
• How much faster is it than the 1 TB Barracuda 7200.12?
• Does the Barracuda 7200.12 benefit from being connected to the Marvell SE9128 controller?

So as you can guess, we ran four different configurations. We gathered a Barracuda XT and a 1 TB Barracuda 7200.12, and connected them to a Gigabyte P55A-UD6, both the P55 PCH and Marvell controller (both in AHCI mode). The rest of the test system looks like this:

• CPU: Intel Core i7 870
• Motherboard: Gigabyte P55a-UD6
• Motherboard BIOS: F6
• Chipset Driver: 9.1.1.1020
• Marvell SE9128 Software: 1.0.0.1027
• Barracuda XT Firmware: CC12
• Barracuda 7200.12 Firmware: CC34
• Memory: 2 x 4 GBCorsair TW3X4G1600C9D
• Memory Timings: 7-7-7-20, 1333 MHz
• Video Card: ATI Radeon 4890HD
• OS: Windows 7 Pro x64

We’ll start things off with the most basic test:

Windows 7 File Copy Speed

To test file transfer rate, each drive was given a pair of 300GB partitions. Several file types were transferred back and forth between these partitions, and I broke out my handy $500 stopwatch giving us the average total transfer speed of each drive and configuration.

Image File Copy

For this test, I simply transferred a collection of RAW CR2 image files from one partition to the other.

Right off the bat, we are seeing the XT outperform its older brother by a decent margin. Interestingly, the 7200.12 also performs better on the Marvell chip. We’ll have to see if that becomes a trend.

ISO File Copy

For this test, a single DVD ISO was copied from one partition to the other.

This time the XT performs best on the Marvell controller, but it’s not much slower on the P55 PCH.

Music File Copy

Music files were in lossless WMA format, from my own personal collection.

We’re starting to see a trend here – the XT outperforms the rest, and the 7200.12 also benefits from the Marvell controller.

“File” File Copy

This time I just transferred a bunch of random files – part of our benchmark collection, actually. Files range from large archives to many small text files, etc.

Once again, you can see that the XT certainly benefits from the Marvell controller so far, but so does the 7200.12, which runs at 3 GBps SATA-II speeds. This tells us that the Marvell controller is perhaps performing some sort of behind-the-scenes trickery with read and write caches, to enhance performance in Windows. You’ll hear no complaints from me on this – this is a real world test, and we’re seeing a real benefit from this.

Let’s take Windows out of the equation, and see how the drives do under good old HD Tach.