The World's First 3TB HDD: Seagate GoFlex Desk 3TB Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 23, 2010 12:39 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
- Seagate
- HDDs
- GoFlex Desk
3TB Internal Drive Performance - Nothing to Get Excited About Yet
To hit 3TB Seagate had to increase the areal density of the Barracuda XT’s platters. If the 3TB drive uses 5 platters that’s 600GB per platter, up from 500GB in the 2TB version. Note that the internal Barracuda XT will most likely have a 64MB DRAM cache and other tweaks to make it more of a performer. This comparison is only useful for those folks trying to get an early jump on the internal 3TB bandwagon:
| SATA Performance Comparison | |||||
| Seagate Barracuda XT 2TB | Seagate GoFlex Desk Barracuda XT 3TB (SATA) | Seagate GoFlex Desk Barracuda XT 3TB (USB 3.0) | |||
| Sequential Read | 131.8 MB/s | 121.4 MB/s | 151.9 MB/s | ||
| Sequential Write | 132.9 MB/s | 119.8 MB/s | 151.2 MB/s | ||
| Random Read | 0.29 MB/s | 0.43 MB/s | 0.30 MB/s | ||
| Random Write | 1.3 MB/s | 0.98 MB/s | 0.93 MB/s | ||
You’ll note that random performance isn’t really much better and sequential performance is actually down from the 2TB drive due in part to the fact that we've got a smaller cache and generally less performance optimized drive with this external 3TB unit compared to the 2TB internal drive. Over USB 3.0 we actually get much better sequential performance apparently due to some additional buffering done by the USB 3 controller.
The bottom line: when internal versions of the 3TB drives ship, don’t expect them to perform much differently from the 2TB drives we have today.
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mindless1 - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
Too many platters, contributing to bearing wear and heat. IMO, the high price is partially to offset the higher chance of failure/RMA replacement cost even with a mere 2 year warranty. Of course it's also due to being the biggest drive available, the high end capacity luxury tax.shin0bi272 - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
why not just get a raid card that has 64big lba and raid the drives in a raid0? I got a software raid5 card with pci-e 4x speed and 4 sata ports on it for 130 bucks. Its not a 3ware but it writes just as fast as my other computer can send it data. Plus if youre looking for that much space a raid is probably a good idea and you should get 3x 2tb drives and do a raid5 anyway for redundancy.shin0bi272 - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
64bit* lba ... cant type before coffee sry.ClagMaster - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
You say 9.4ZB is an absurd amount of data.I say that 2TB is an absurd amount of data.
I have been using a 160GB drive paritioned into 3 partions and for six years I am not challenged with space.
shin0bi272 - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
Ive got over 1tb in just my music collection so 2tb isnt really that big of a number.mewgirl - Monday, January 31, 2011 - link
Not really, just 200 or 300 songs in a proper format and your drive will be filled...mewgirl - Monday, January 31, 2011 - link
No wait, 300 songs is only 15 CDs, so let's say 1,000 or so songs, but either way that's a hell of a lot less then how many songs you're actually going to want, if human brains were actually capable of remembering all of them and if computers were capable of finding and properly formatting all of them.cjs150 - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
Ripping Blu-ray disks chews through a lot of hard disk space. Add in a daughter with lots of music and 2TB is not enough.I am looking for 6TB storage in a RAID 5 for my home as enough to keep me going at least for the next 5-6 years
abrar - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
Isn't there any program that you give it the files (suppose your are going to copy / backup ~ 3TB of data ) you are going to copy , and set a temperature threshold , so that when it reaches that temperature, it stops , or reduces the speed of , copying and when temp. gets normal and it cools down, continues in normal mode. ?!that is quiet and idea !
mewgirl - Monday, January 31, 2011 - link
Uh I thought SpeedFan did that.