The Seagate BarraCuda (500GB) SSD Review: Getting Back In The Game
by Billy Tallis on December 7, 2018 8:00 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy
Our Heavy storage benchmark is proportionally more write-heavy than The Destroyer, but much shorter overall. The total writes in the Heavy test aren't enough to fill the drive, so performance never drops down to steady state. This test is far more representative of a power user's day to day usage, and is heavily influenced by the drive's peak performance. The Heavy workload test details can be found here. This test is run twice, once on a freshly erased drive and once after filling the drive with sequential writes.
The Seagate BarraCuda's average data rate on the Heavy test is lower than normal for mainstream TLC SATA drives. The Plextor M8V performs similarly, suggesting that the Toshiba 3D TLC NAND is a more important contributor to this poor performance than the aging Phison S10 controller that the BarraCuda uses. Overall performance from the BarraCuda doesn't suffer much when the test is run on a full drive, but that's also generally true of current-generation mainstream drives.
The average and 99th percentile latency scores from the BarraCuda are a bit on the high side, but the gap between the BarraCuda and the fastest SATA drives is less than a factor of two. More importantly, the BarraCuda is not a severe outlier even for the full-drive test run, and it does not appear that the BarraCuda suffers from any severe stuttering even under intense workloads.
The average read and write latencies for the BarraCuda aren't vastly slower than other mainstream drives, but the BarraCuda does rank near last place among its primary competitors, with write latency being a bit more of a problem than read latency.
The 99th percentile read latency from the BarraCuda is only slightly worse than other mainstream TLC drives, and fortunately much better than the Plextor M8V's score. The BarraCuda's 99th percentile write latency is worse off, with more than twice the latency of its primary competition.
The Seagate BarraCuda is more or less tied with the planar TLC-based OCZ Trion 150 for worse overall energy efficiency on the Heavy test, though the DRAMless Mushkin Source is so slow on the full-drive test run that its energy usage outstrips everything else.
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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.