The Seagate BarraCuda (500GB) SSD Review: Getting Back In The Game
by Billy Tallis on December 7, 2018 8:00 AM ESTIdle Power Measurement
SATA SSDs are tested with SATA link power management disabled to measure their active idle power draw, and with it enabled for the deeper idle power consumption score and the idle wake-up latency test. Our testbed, like any ordinary desktop system, cannot trigger the deepest DevSleep idle state.
Idle power management for NVMe SSDs is far more complicated than for SATA SSDs. NVMe SSDs can support several different idle power states, and through the Autonomous Power State Transition (APST) feature the operating system can set a drive's policy for when to drop down to a lower power state. There is typically a tradeoff in that lower-power states take longer to enter and wake up from, so the choice about what power states to use may differ for desktop and notebooks.
We report two idle power measurements. Active idle is representative of a typical desktop, where none of the advanced PCIe link or NVMe power saving features are enabled and the drive is immediately ready to process new commands. The idle power consumption metric is measured with PCIe Active State Power Management L1.2 state enabled and NVMe APST enabled if supported.
The active idle power consumption of the Phison S10 controller has always been pretty good, though the Seagate BarraCuda draws a bit more at idle than some of the older S10 drives we've tested. When SATA link power management is enabled and the drive is put to sleep, the BarraCuda's power consumption is only cut in half and every other drive with working power management comes out ahead.
The Seagate BarraCuda had relatively poor idle power management, so it's appropriate for it to have one of the quickest wake-up latencies, slightly faster than the two older Phison S10 drives featured here. The BarraCuda wakes up seven times faster than the fastest Silicon Motion-based drive, and 26 times faster than the Toshiba TR200 that uses Phison's DRAMless S11 controller. The BarraCuda should definitely be used with the OS configured for the most aggressive drive power management, because the performance impact is minimal.
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automator_devops - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
Looking forward to these being the first SSDs exhibiting the "click of death". Makes no sense I know, low quality humor. I actually do have a Seagate Archive 8TB in my case.Donkey2008 - Thursday, December 13, 2018 - link
If any manufacturer could accomplish this it would definitely be Seagate. They are the Hynix of hard drives - Mostly OEM, not reliable and shockingly still in business. I wouldn't buy anything from that company if my life depended on it.Donkey2008 - Thursday, December 13, 2018 - link
Oh, and I laughed when I first read your comment :-)aylak - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
I owned several mechanical hard drives from Seagate and all of the failed at some point. I know it doesn't mean that their SSD drives will be as unreliable but it is funny that first thing came to my mind is this as I saw the title.Alim345 - Saturday, December 8, 2018 - link
There was one particularly unreliable series of those hard drives. Also HDD are not absolutely reliable and will inevitably fail after some timeBeaver M. - Wednesday, December 12, 2018 - link
Indeed. Yet Seagate wasnt very good at that either. They had far higher failure rates than WD and even Samsung (which also werent great).But its good to see that this seems to have changed. At least with their bigger drives. They seem to be on par with WD now, but WD isnt as good as it was a few years ago. I guess this HDD cartel made them sloppy.
Thats why I bought a Toshiba and HGST (shortly before they rebranded them as WD).
KAlmquist - Sunday, December 9, 2018 - link
When it was an independent company, Sandforce never demonstrated the ability to effectively test and debug their products. So the good think about Seagate going with a time-tested Toshiba controller is that it's possible to buy these drives and be confident that they will work correctly. If Seagate drops the price to the point where these drives represent a good value for the money, I would have no problem recommending them.III-V - Sunday, December 9, 2018 - link
Bit hard to read the article title on the front page -- white text on white photo doesn't really work!Billy Tallis - Monday, December 10, 2018 - link
There's supposed to be a partially transparent dark overlay at the bottom of the photo to serve as a background for the title text. Try re-loading the page, and if it still doesn't render, send us a bug report with a screenshot.