amazon SEAGATE BARRACUDA 250GB reviews
Facing the explosion of solid-state drives (SSDs), big players in traditional HDDs like Seagate are also hard to ignore and are forced to embark on a new battle to strengthen their position one time.
In essence, Seagate has been in the SSD market since 2009, a dozen years ago. But the company is too focused on SSDs for businesses, ignoring the individual user market. As a result, Seagate was left behind in the SSD race, and it was not until last year that it was determined to return strongly to a series of products such as BarraCuda, FireCuda and IronWolf.
While IronWolf is aimed at NAS storage systems, FireCuda for high performance laptops or PC gaming, BarraCuda will be suitable for general users, need to upgrade from HDD to SSD to improve performance.
With BarraCuda 250GB, according to the specifications announced by Seagate, this SSD model has a maximum sequential read speed of 560 MB / s, maximum sequential write speed of 530 MB / s. The random read and write speed of 4 KB QD32 both reached 90,000 IOPS. The drive has a read and write limit of 120TB, a 1.8 million hour uptime. The product uses the Phison S10 controller, Toshiba’s 64-layer 3D NAND TLC memory chip.
In addition to 250GB capacity, Seagate BarraCuda also has many other capacities from 500GB to 2TB for users to choose depending on storage needs. Seagate BarraCuda 250GB will compete directly with rivals such as SamSung 860 Evo, WD Blue, Crucial MX500.
Will the seasoned experience in storage help Seagate create success with BarraCuda? The following review will partly answer that question.
Box
Right from the box, Seagate proved to be quite cared for its products with cool green tones, the image of BarraCuda being splashed in striking water. Along with that is clear information about the capacity level, maximum speed.
Inside the box, similar to many other popular SSD models, the accessory comes simply with a user manual, the drive is packed in an antistatic silver bag and placed in a plastic tray to reduce impact during transport. In addition, nothing more. As such, when installed in a PC, you will need to equip additional SATA cables and screws. With a thickness of 7mm, size 2.5 inches, Seagate’s SSD model also easily fits most laptops today.
In contrast to the boxy part, BarraCuda’s appearance follows a simple traditional style familiar with the dominant black tone, Seagate logo printed on one side. The shell is made from rough metal, cool, while ensuring heat dissipation. The standard SATA III connector is perfectly fine, with no signs of smudging.
Fresh green reappears on the back, which contains details about capacity level, connection standard, serial number. The information here shows that Seagate BarraCuda 250GB is manufactured in Taiwan.
Good performance in the price range, high stability
To test the actual performance of Seagate BarraCuda 250GB, BiaReview uses a computer system with the following configuration:
CPU: Intel Core i7 8700
Motherboard: MSI Z370-A Pro
RAM: Gskill Trident Z RGB DDR4 4x8GB 3200MHz
VGA: Gigabyte GTX 1060 G1 Gaming 6GB
PSU: FSP Saga 550W
The first noticeable point when using this Seagate SSD model is that the product also has a management software package called SeaTools SSD from Seagate genuine. Unfortunately, the manufacturer didn’t mention the SeaTools toolkit on the box or the manual that I had to find on the company’s website.
SeaTools SSD provides the necessary tools such as checking actual capacity, hard disk status, recorded data level, temperature, free space, and remaining life.
In addition, this software also allows you to copy all data from old hard drive to BarraCuda to save time installing the operating system and frequently used applications. In addition, some other useful features can be mentioned such as updating the firmware, adjusting the capacity, performance, checking errors, or wiping the data in the drive when transferring.
SeaTools interface is relatively intuitive, friendly, easy to use and you should install this software to take full advantage of Seagate BarraCuda’s features.
To check the specifications of hard drives in general, Crystal Disk Info is arguably the most popular tool. Here, we can see the name, capacity, usage time, connection standards, or if the drive is having problems.
Crystal Disk Mark, “a brother” with Crystal Disk Info is one of the most intuitive, easy to use hard drive benchmarking tools available today. This is also the application used by most hard drive manufacturers to announce the read / write speed of their products.
For this tool, the average user will need to pay attention to two results: sequential read and write speed (top line, this is also the speed that brands mention in their products) and access speed. 4KiB random output (bottom line).
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The results showed that the sequential read and write scores of Seagate BarraCuda 250GB were 564.1 MB / s and 531.5 MB / s, respectively, slightly better than announced by Seagate and at a good level. Meanwhile, the random access speed is slightly lower than the SSDs of the same capacity in the market, respectively, only 36.59 MB / s when reading and 69.69 MB / s when writing.
Next is the AS SSD benchmark software, which is supposed to more accurately reflect the speed of the hard drive than the Crystal Disk Mark due to the use of uncompressed data instead of compressing it, so the speed will be lower. The overall score of Seagate BarraCuda 250GB is 1021.
Atto Disk Benchmark, an old but still trusted tool that allows users to monitor hard drive performance in various data size options. In this test, BiaReview set the drive to access 256MB of data, with file sizes from 512B to 64MB. BarraCuda 250GB has the lowest speed in the range of 22.4MB / s, the highest is 539.58 MB / s for reading and 509.45 MB / s for writing, quite close to Seagate’s published speed of 560 MB / s read and 530 MB / s write.
Another classic tool, Anvil’s Storage Utilities, with a 1GB test file continues to show BarraCuda 250GB has good performance with a maximum sequential read speed of 530.57 MB / s, maximum write of 485.31 MB / s. Meanwhile, the random read speed reaches 86,901 IOPS and the random write reaches 65,556 IOPS, close to the 90,000 IOPS announced by Seagate.
In order to measure SSD stability, an equally popular tool, HDTune Pro, was chosen to test this criterion. The write speed of the BarraCuda 250GB saw a sharp fluctuation around the first 15GB but then reached a high level of stability at all subsequent capacity levels until the drive was full. The highest speed reached 364 MB / s and the average reached 276.8 MB / s.
Along with that, BarraCuda’s reading speed graph is also good stability, almost unchanged and reaches a high average speed of 461.5 MB / s, the lowest is still 420.2 MB / s.
With a 10GB file copy test to test the actual write speed, BarraCuda 250GB gives a speed of about 480 MB / s in the first 5GB, and gradually decreases to 280 MB / s in the next 5GB. It can be seen that the BarraCuda cache is about 5GB.
Tested when the drive was filled with 93% capacity, the results did not change much and showed the stable performance of Seagate BarraCuda.
Summary
Seagate BarraCuda has shown good and stable performance even when there is very little free space. Despite its unattractive appearance, Seagate has done a good job of balancing the price and performance of BarraCuda. It can be seen that the seasoned experience in the array of storage and the acquisition of SSD controller specialist SandForce has helped Seagate get certain results on BarraCuda.
If you are looking for an acceleration solution for a computer system using a traditional HDD from a reputable supplier, this is obviously the option you should consider.
Advantages:
+ Stable performance in the price range, high stability
+ Pretty capacity, good meet storage needs
+ Finishing metal shell
Defect:
– Appearance does not have many highlights
– 4K reading speed is slower than other products on the market