Seagate BarraCuda Pro 12TB HDD Review
by Ganesh T S on November 15, 2017 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
- Seagate
- HDDs
- Helium HDD
Performance - Direct Attached Storage Mode
Seagate suggests that the BarraCuda Pro Compute drives are suitable for use in direct-attached storage systems. We evaluated the performance in such a usage scenario using one of the highest performing 2-bay DAS units currently in the market - the Akitio Thunder3 Duo Pro, connected to our testbed via a Thunderbolt 3 interface.
Prior to processing real-life workloads, we first checked quick artificial access traces using ATTO and CrystalDiskMark.
We find that the performance remains consistent irrespective of workload size as long as the sequential access characteristic holds. Two drives in RAID 0 can sustain 530 MBps+ reads and writes. RAID 1 performance is similar to the standalone drive performance.
Both RAID0 and RAID1 configurations were subject to our standard DAS test suite described in the previous section. The robocopy test suite gave the following results.
| Akitio Thunder3 Duo Pro + 2x Seagate BarraCuda Pro 12TB (Thunderbolt 3) robocopy Benchmarks (MBps) |
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| Write Bandwidth | Read Bandwidth | |||
| RAID 0 | RAID 1 | RAID 0 | RAID 1 | |
| Photos | 334.00 | 215.79 | 303.85 | 184.12 |
| Videos | 432.76 | 221.45 | 396.39 | 222.44 |
| Blu-ray Folder | 421.10 | 219.98 | 434.73 | 224.72 |
There is no difference in the performance consistency between either RAID configuration. The behavior is largely similar to the internal drive scenario, except for the RAID 0 absolute bandwidth numbers. Thanks to the enclosure's fan, the temperature increase is also not as much as what we observed in the internal drive case.
We also processed select workloads from PCMark 8's storage bench.
| Akitio Thunder3 Duo Pro + 2x Seagate BarraCuda Pro 12TB (Thunderbolt 3) PCMark8 Storage Benchmarks (MBps) |
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| Write Bandwidth | Read Bandwidth | ||||
| RAID 0 | RAID 1 | RAID 0 | RAID 1 | ||
| Adobe Photoshop (Light) | 313.76 | 201.22 | 10.51 | 9.16 | |
| Adobe Photoshop (Heavy) | 304.70 | 196.83 | 12.46 | 10.99 | |
| Adobe After Effects | 95.00 | 74.12 | 9.75 | 9.54 | |
| Adobe Illustrator | 214.10 | 168.92 | 9.39 | 9.11 | |
A significant speed-up in response time is achieved while dealing with multimedia files stored in a RAID 0 configuration of two BarraCuda Pro 12TB drives in a Thunderbolt 3 enclosure. Combined with the consistency shown, we can say that our results back up Segate's claims regarding the firmware tuning of BarraCuda Pro drives for specific application scenarios.
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ddrіver - Wednesday, November 15, 2017 - link
"Conventional" magnetic recording is "giant magneto resistor recording". So what you're saying doesn't make sense.takeshi7 - Thursday, November 16, 2017 - link
It makes perfect sense. CMR is how hard drives have stored data on tracks since their inception in the 1950's. SMR is a different strategy for writing the tracks that has the writer overlap with previously written tracks to increase track density."Shingled" magnetic recording is also "giant magneto resistor recording". So that's not a good way to differentiate between them.
ddrіver - Thursday, November 16, 2017 - link
If CMR was the way HDDs worked from the inception then why would you call SMR anything other than that? They're all the same. Magnet. Poles. Everything else is buzzwords the industry is feeding you to make you buy more and more. And the sheeple buy.cm2187 - Wednesday, November 15, 2017 - link
Important question for usage in consumer NAS: how noisy is it?ganeshts - Wednesday, November 15, 2017 - link
All hard drives make noise - particularly if there are lots of random accesses making the heads move around a lot, and I don't think this was any more noisy than other disks that I have evaluated before. Spec sheets put it in the same category as everyone else - 28 dB typical / 30 dB max at idle, 32 dB typical / 34 dB max for performance seeks.To be honest, no one has brought up this aspect before, and I don't think
Ahnilated - Wednesday, November 15, 2017 - link
Do people still buy Seagate's stuff? Their HDD's have a notoriously high level of failure.coburn_c - Wednesday, November 15, 2017 - link
I don't think that's true anymore.haukionkannel - Wednesday, November 15, 2017 - link
Yep, that was a long time ago.Senti - Wednesday, November 15, 2017 - link
Nop, it's still very true. Seagate still holds undisputed first place on HDD failure %.CheapSushi - Thursday, November 16, 2017 - link
I believe that was just mainly for their 3TB or 4TB variants.