The Seagate BarraCuda (500GB) SSD Review: Getting Back In The Game
by Billy Tallis on December 7, 2018 8:00 AM ESTConclusion
Seagate's return to the consumer market doesn't make much of a splash. The most remarkable thing about the Seagate BarraCuda is that it gets by with such an old SSD controller.
Overall, it's a surprisingly good showing for a drive with a controller that first hit the retail market four years ago.
The Phison S10 controller had a very forward-looking design, with support for 2TB capacities planned from the start despite that much flash being almost unthinkably expensive in the era of 19nm planar MLC. The quad-core CPU has come in handy in recent generations as the market has moved to TLC NAND that generally requires SLC write caches to offer the best performance.
However, the S10 controller is not fully up to the task of competing against more modern controllers. The Plextor M8V serves as a useful point of comparison; it uses the same Toshiba 3D TLC as the BarraCuda but pairs it with the Silicon Motion SM2258 that we usually find used with Intel/Micron flash. The SM2258 is a four-channel controller compared to the 8 channels on the Phison S10, but the Plextor M8V's performance surpasses the Seagate BarraCuda more often than not.
The limitations of the 6Gbps SATA interface have been a strong equalizing force, requiring SSDs to improve in ways other than top-line throughput numbers. Most notably, power efficiency has continued to improve in the years since the Phison S10 debuted. The Seagate BarraCuda enjoys some of those benefits thanks to its use of modern 3D TLC NAND, but it doesn't come close to the efficiency of drives with modern controllers and lower-power DRAM.
There are some bright spots in the BarraCuda's performance profile. It handles a heavy write load about as well as any SATA SSD, with no significant performance drop from SLC cache running out during continuous sequential writes. Sequential read performance is fine as well. But the Phison S10 has always struggled with mixed read/write workloads, and 3D NAND doesn't change that. On real-world tasks, the BarraCuda is clearly slower than its competition, and ends up being more comparable to the best-case performance we see from DRAMless SSDs.
| SATA SSD Price Comparison | ||||
| 250GB | 500GB | 1TB | 2TB | |
| Seagate Barracuda | $52.99 (21¢/GB) | $84.99 (17¢/GB) | $149.99 (15¢/GB) | $349.99 (17¢/GB) |
| Samsung 860 EVO | $53.99 (22¢/GB) | $72.99 (15¢/GB) | $149.99 (15¢/GB) | $299.99 (15¢/GB) |
| WD Blue 3D NAND | $52.99 (21¢/GB) | $79.99 (16¢/GB) | $144.98 (14¢/GB) | $357.49 (18¢/GB) |
| Crucial MX500 | $52.99 (21¢/GB) | $72.99 (15¢/GB) | $134.99 (13¢/GB) | $289.99 (14¢/GB) |
Now that the big Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales are over, SSD prices have gone back up by a few dollars here and there, and drives that went out of stock are starting to become available again. The major competitors to the Seagate BarraCuda that also offer capacities up to 2TB are the Samsung 860 EVO, WD Blue, and Crucial MX500. All offer higher performance and better power efficiency than the BarraCuda, and their prices are mostly equal to or slightly lower than the BarraCuda. Seagate is pricing the BarraCuda like a mainstream SATA drive, but it can't really keep pace with the competitors that use current-generation flash and current-generation controllers.
There aren't any serious problems with the Seagate BarraCuda, especially for desktop usage where power efficiency is not a priority. But unless it can offer a significant discount relative to other mainstream TLC SATA SSDs, there's no reason to consider buying it.
Where does Seagate go from here?
Unlike rival Western Digital, Seagate missed their chance at full vertical integration of the SSD side of the business. Seagate did invest $1.27 billion in Toshiba Memory Corporation as part of the consortium that acquired it from from its cash-strapped parent company, but Seagate had to agree not to acquire any voting interest or governance rights in Toshiba Memory during the next decade. Still, Toshiba has been Seagate's primary NAND supplier for quite a while and that will continue to be the case for the foreseeable future.
That makes Phison the natural choice of supplier for consumer SSD controllers. Phison has a close relationship with Toshiba and almost all Phison-based SSDs use Toshiba NAND. For the Seagate BarraCuda SSD specifically, the decision to partner with Phison may not have been the best option, but if Seagate is serious about staying in the consumer SSD market then a Phison partnership is clearly the easiest way for them to develop a full product portfolio. Phison's latest generation of NVMe controllers have been pretty good, and they have a successor to the S10 SATA controller that will be ready soon.
In order to be a top-tier competitor in the consumer SSD space, Seagate will have to be able to consistently differentiate their products from the competition. A Phison-based product line makes that pretty difficult, since there are dozens of brands selling very similar products. Seagate's acquisition of controller vendor SandForce offered some hope that they could bring to market products with custom in-house controllers, but several years later all we've seen is the recent introduction of an enterprise SATA SSD with transparent compression bearing SandForce's DuraWrite trademark.
Seagate has re-entered the consumer SSD market after a long absence, but they face an uphill battle to establish a serious presence.
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seamonkey79 - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
The caddy would adapt an m.2 to a full 2.5" SATA socket, so you would have an m.2 in a chassis adapting it to 2.5" & classic SATA.That being said, I can't see that doing anything but increasing costs, though having one primary line to manufacture m.2 and the little bit of work needed to adapt an m.2 SATA drive to 2.5", it *could* see some benefit to the manufacturer.
Death666Angel - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
Huh? M.2 SATA doesn't overheat, that's M.2 NVME/PCIe (which is a bit more difficult to adapt to 2.5" SATA, so I don't care as much). 2.5" SATA drives already have tiny PCBs. They are already bottlenecked by the protocol. With them being M.2 in a 2.5" caddy, they can serve double purpose. I just bought an M.2 drive and a caddy for my Fujitsu T904 laptop, which still has only a 2.5" slot. But I know when that laptop is gone, I'm not gonna need a 2.5" drive. That M.2 drive can be converted into all kinds of useful devices, small desktops, laptops, USB thumb drive. It'd cost them a couple dozens of cents more to manufacture, would it'd be soo much more useful. :D Eventually, more people will use M.2 SATA than 2.5". At least those who buy standalone drives.CheapSushi - Saturday, December 8, 2018 - link
Dragonstongue I don't think you really know what the OP is talking about, just how tiny the PCB seems to be on newer 2.5" SSDs, thus just being a whole lot of waste of space anyway and/or you don't realize adapters already exist and/or don't realize M.2 is just a formfactor and can be NVMe/PCIe or AHCI/SATA. There's always someone who confidently posts a "neg" at a suggestion without even knowing hardware much in the first place.dgingeri - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
When I was a systems admin for a server software test lab, we received a set (108) of 3TB Seagate Constellation ES.2 SAS drives for a new prototype appliance that would eventually become the DXi6900 series. I was pretty excited to see the new hardware come in, so I got things set up within a day.The test team wasn't ready to test for another week. In that week, we had 12 of those drives go bad. By two months into the project, every single Seagate drive had gone bad. (These are their enterprise level drives, which are supposed to have better reliability.) We ended up requesting a different brand drive from NetApp (the maker of the storage portion of the DXi6900) because of these problems. We replaced them with HGST 4TB drives, and didn't have a single one fail up to the point when I left over two years later.
In the years leading up to that, I had bought several Seagate drives, including 4 1TB drives, 2 2TB drives, and one 3TB drive, and had the drive fail within warranty in EVERY SINGLE CASE. That was specifically why I quit buying them, and the 3TB drive is the last Seagate drive I am ever going to buy intentionally.
This just might be a decent crive, and if Seagate were to put a concerted effort into improving their reliability, they might be something I'd consider. However, as things stand, Seagate and Toshiba are on my NEVER BUY list, along side Biostar, ECS, and Gigabyte.
CheapSushi - Saturday, December 8, 2018 - link
What does this have to do with SSDs at all? Seriously? This is just some overreaching rant saying that one specific type of product means that ALL their products are a problem. Especially about spinning rust several years old; even BackBlaze doesn't use those. Have you even bothered to look into reliability statistics/information on even consumer TLC drives? It's so odd to see people who claim to be in tech but are so antiquated in their knowledge.gglaw - Sunday, December 9, 2018 - link
Quite a humorous post from someone with a supposed heavy tech/admin background but so short-sighted on the big picture. He lists a bad experience from a completely unrelated product line likely not even sharing manufacturing or R&D ties in any way making him ban products from some of the largest tech companies in the world with for the most part tremendous track records. Even if it is in "principle" for how the company leaders model their QC, all the executives making these decisions at the time of the archaic hard drive problems are likely working with other companies by now (pretty good chance for one of his "new" favorite companies). Similar to the comments on some of Samsung's early SSD fiascos banning all Samsung products "for life." And of course shortly after their fiascos, they quickly became essentially the world's benchmark for performance and reliability in this same product line lol.Donkey2008 - Thursday, December 13, 2018 - link
108 enterprise-class hard drives failed in 2 months?[Insert Doubt meme]
sarahkevin - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
thanks for sharing I really need this for my office.PeachNCream - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
I think I'd probably opt for a Crucial MX500 over a Seagate SSD. Seagate's reputation and my experiences with their mechanical drives make me reluctant about giving them yet another chance.Fujikoma - Friday, December 21, 2018 - link
I feel the same way about Quantum SCSI drives. Not that Seagate rates much higher...