Seagate Barracuda 3TB (ST3000DM001)

Introduction

Seagate is at the forefront of the mechanical drive market with the first ever drives to contain 1TB per platter. The the newly re-introduced Barracuda drive. We say "re-introduced" because the Barracuda 3TB drive that we have here today is actually a new drive, yet Seagate has introduced other drives under the same brand previously. Seagate released Barracuda XT 3TB drive, which we had reviewed back in April.

Along with the launching of the first ever 1TB/platter drive, Seagate also announced that the company is streamlining its Barracuda product family. Seagate will kill off the Barracuda Green line, leaving the Barracuda family's focus solely on performance mechanical hard drives. Seagate’s own assessment shows that the low-power Barracuda Green hard drives barely save less than a dollar per year in electricity cost, while causing a 20% to 40% performance reduction. Seagate believes the saved power does not compensate for the tradeoff in performance due to lower rotational speed.

This moves makes a lot of sense, since SSD's have changed desktop storage: users that need a fast random access drive would be better off choosing an SSD. Mechanical drives serve better as storage drives.

Barracuda

To give readers some idea, a 1TB per platter drive packs 340,000 tracks across the disc for an average track size of a mere 75nm—smaller than a flu virus. The benefit of going with higher density platters means more data can be packed on each platter, decreasing the manufacturing cost, as fewer platters are needed for the same amount of data space. The result of platter reduction translates into lower power consumption as fewer platters need to be read. It also means faster sequential access performance. Of course, it can also mean that we will see larger storage capacity in the future.

With 1TB platters, Seagate only needs three platters to accomplish 3TB of storage space as opposed to the regular density platter drives that require five platters. With two fewer platters, the new drive sheds 0.168 grams off and weighs in at 1.38g.

The new Barracuda is not simply a rebranded drive with 1TB platters. In fact, the new drive also features a new controller, which according to Seagate, is a 40nm dual-core processor. The amount of memory has not been changed and it is still packed with 64MB of DDR2-800 DRAM for cache.

In addition, the high density platter drive also features 4K sector advanced format as oppose to the 512 byte format that was found in previous drives. It also comes with Seagate's AccuTrac servo technology, OptiCache technology, and SmartAlign technology. Seagate also includes the DiscWizard software for systems without UEFI BIOS and allows Windows XP to utilize the full 3TB storage capacity.