SEAGATE BARRACUDA 3TB Hard drive Review

At 4.6 cents per gigabyte, you can’t afford to pass up the Barracuda 3TB.

It’s weird to say this, but the sweet-spot hard drive is the same as the Best of the Best hard drive. The 3TB Seagate Barracuda is the best combination of price, performance, and capacity, whether you’re using it as your only drive or as the backup for a boot SSD. Its sequential read and write speeds of over 150MB/s make it the fastest 7,200rpm drive we’ve ever tested, and its price of $140 means its per-gigabyte cost is only 4.6 cents, making it the best value on the market right now. By contrast, 2TB “Green” drives, which spin at around 5,900rpm, are around $120 from WD and Seagate right now. Why pay more per gigabyte for slower storage? Cost-per-gigabyte goes way up as size goes down, too, especially for any drive under 1TB.

If your budget can’t stretch to $140 and you don’t have an SSD, you’ll want to pri-oritize performance over capacity. Get a 2TB Barracuda (make sure it’s one of the two-platter 7,200rpm ones with 64MB of cache).

At $100, that’s 5 cents per gigabyte. 2TB WD Caviar Black drives, on the other hand, are over $200 at press time.

If you do have an SSD and you only have, say, $85 or $90, get the 1.5TB Barracuda Green from NCIX US. It’s one of the few drives over 1TB that are under $100 right now, though we hope that changes as the in-dustry recovers.

Whether Seagate is engaged in a price war or it just fared better in the Thailand floods of last year, its drive prices are unbeatable at press time, and the 3TB Barracuda is by far the most screaming deal.

SPECIFICATIONS

	Price	Price per Gigabyte	Spin Speed rpm)	Cache (MB)
3TB Seagate Barracuda	$140	0.047	7.200	64
1.5TB Seagate Barracuda Green	$70	0.047	5.900	64
3TB WD Caviar Green	$148	0.049	5.400	64
2TB Seagate Barracuda	$100	0.050	7.200	64
2TB Seagate Barracuda Green	$100	0.050	5.900	64
1.5TB Seagate Barracuda	$82	0.055	7.200	32
2TB WD Caviar Green	$110	0.055	5.400	64
3TB HGST Deskstar	$200	0.068	7.200	64
1TB WD Caviar Blue	$83	0.083	7.200	32
1TB Seagate Barracuda	$86	0.086	7.200	64
1TB WD Caviar Green	$89	0.089	5.400	32

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