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amazon Seagate BarraCuda Fast SSD 1TB USB Type C reviews
Seagate BarraCuda Fast SSD – One of the “bad” of today’s powerful mid-range gaming laptops like the MSI Bravo 15 model is that the amount of internal hard drive memory is cut to just enough to use. Even is slightly lower than the common ground of high-end office laptop products today, so that the manufacturer can focus on the configuration side to offer an attractive price for users.
As a result, when owning these laptops, users must consider a storage expansion solution to meet the increasingly “expand” needs of modern games, such as Call of Duty: Warzone was able to “eat” players up to 200GB of hard drive for the original and the updates.
Given that large-capacity M.2, solid-state drives are still too expensive, perhaps external hard drives using SSD cores will be products that bring balance in performance and the best price for current users.
So Seagate, one of the world’s leading storage device manufacturers, has launched several high-speed external storage solutions for gamers, including the Seagate BarraCuda Fast SSD series with diverse compatibility on different systems.
Suppose the line of external hard drives in the form of mechanical drives often uses the “core,” which is an internal hard drive for PC or Laptop with a familiar 2.5″ size like the Western Digital My Passport hard driveline. In that case, the SSD external hard drive market has a much more diverse design, depending on the design motto of each company, and our external hard drive model is not an exception.
It must be said that the writer’s first impression of the Seagate BarraCuda Fast SSD is the thinness and lightness of the product along with the extremely luxurious and elegant minimalist design, easily attracting the eyes of users right away at first sight.
Although the product is made mostly of hard plastic material, the top of the hard drive is covered with a high-quality aluminum plate with the white Seagate brand name using a simple font that stands out on a black background, anti-reflective. Supports the entire hard drive chassis so that if you hold it in your hand, you will easily feel the sturdiness and reliability of this hard drive model far more than hard drive models made entirely of plastic material.
The plastic shell and aluminum protection plate is a small slot decorated by Seagate with a green LED border, quite impressive and mysterious if used in the dark.
Overall, the Seagate BarraCuda Fast SSD is significantly larger than the KINGMAX KE31 480GB hard drive model. That’s because the circuit board is designed with memory chips on the same side, tightly pressed against the aluminum shell to dissipate heat passively. So compared to products with chip designs on both sides of the board from Kingmax, Seagate’s products are thinner and have much better heat dissipation.
Another notable point is that this external hard drive model uses a USB Type C connection instead of the USB 3.0 port commonly found on portable hard drives commonly found on the market.
That makes it easier to connect cable; you can even use the same cable with the charging cable on newer smartphone models.
In addition, this external hard drive model can also be directly connected to a mobile phone or tablet via the USB Type C dual-head cable that comes with the box. This feature is extremely useful for those who like to shoot movies and take photos on their phones that need large storage space that memory cards or internal memory cannot meet.
In general, overall design, Seagate BarraCuda Fast SSD is a pretty good hard drive model thanks to its simple design, but effective thanks to the application of aluminum plate in manufacturing, both protective and medium heat dissipation effect. In addition, the USB Type C port is a convenient highlight in the context of many hard drives using USB 3.0 ports today.
As an external SSD in the form of an SSD, the Seagate BarraCuda Fast SSD has a speed that can be considered very high in today’s portable hard drives. Effectively exploiting the USB 3.0 transmission speed of 5Gbps using an internal connection is SATA III, which maxes out at 550MBps.
More specifically, when tested with the CrystalDiskMark 7.0.0 hard drive scoring program, the Q8T1 sequential read speed of the hard drive was up to 464MBps, while the Q1T1 sequential read speed was also at 405MBps, slightly better compared to KINGMAX KE31 480GB.
Meanwhile, to random read speed, our portable hard drive model can achieve Random 4K Q32T16 random read speed up to 178MBps. In comparison, Random 4K Q1T1 small file random read speed also at 28MBps, much faster than the 146MBps and 20MBps of products from Kingmax; this gives a significant advantage to the hard drive in downloading games with many small files.
Lightly testing on the game Horizon Zero Dawn PC on MSI Bravo 15 laptop shows that the game loading speed is not changed compared to the internal hard drive.
That is an open-world game with a fairly large amount of texture data that requires random read speeds to keep up with game load speeds; otherwise, the game will experience serious material and texture loss important.
Continuing to test the game Total War Saga: Troy with a high amount of data to be loaded for each match, Seagate BarraCuda Fast SSD still works stably without causing any obstacles to the game loading process and throughout the playing process.
When using direct gaming for a long time, the aluminum cover on the hard drive is only slightly warm. There is no overheating on the controller chip like some hard drive models are designed entirely in plastic heat secret, suitable only for short-term read/write operations.
Try connecting the hard drive to the phone; you can easily access and manipulate the large files in the hard drive easily; you can even back up the phone through the Seagate Mobile Backup program company with just a few simple steps.
In general, Seagate BarraCuda Fast SSD is a pretty powerful portable hard drive model for gamers with the ability to load games directly from the hard drive at high speed, effective heat dissipation for long-term gaming. Like easy backups with Seagate’s support program.
Possessing a good design, high read/write speed, and good heat dissipation, but in return, the Seagate BarraCuda Fast SSD has a rather high price, almost equivalent to the M.2 stick hard drive models. Using NVMe interface with the same capacity but with many times more increased speed.
That’s why this model of external hard drive becomes less attractive when put on the scale to choose to upgrade a laptop with an internal hard drive or buy an external hard drive.
Not to mention that this model of external hard drive also competition from external hard drives that use NVMe interface instead of SATA III to be able to take full advantage of the connection’s high-speed USB 3.2 up to 20Gbps today with a slightly higher price.