| Seagate Barracuda 3TB Hard Drive ST3000DM001 |  |
| Reviews - Featured Reviews: Storage | |
| Written by Olin Coles | |
| Tuesday, 01 November 2011 | |
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Page 5 of 10
ATTO Disk BenchmarkThe ATTO Disk Benchmark program is free, and offers a comprehensive set of test variables to work with. In terms of disk performance, it measures interface transfer rates at various intervals for a user-specified length and then reports read and write speeds for these spot-tests. There are some minor improvements made to the 2.46 version of the program that allow for test lengths up to 2GB, but all of our benchmarks are conducted with 256MB total length. ATTO Disk Benchmark requires that an active partition be set on the drive being tested. Please consider the results displayed by this benchmark to be basic bandwidth speed performance indicators. ATTO Disk Benchmark offered very consistent results for both the Seagate Barracuda XT ST33000651AS (five-platter) and new Seagate Barracuda ST3000DM001 (three-platter). Both hard drives shared a nearly identical read and write ramp-up to their maximum output, and both produced similar test scores. After comparing the results, it appears that the new Seagate Barracuda ST3000DM001 (three-platter) hard drive shows an advantage with this test. The read and write speeds were just a few MB/s faster with the new Seagate Barracuda ST3000DM001, but they reach that maximum output just a bit quicker.
Seagate Barracuda XT 3TB Hard Drive ST33000651AS (Five-Platter)
Seagate Barracuda 3TB Hard Drive ST3000DM001 (Three-Platter)In the next section, Benchmark Reviews tests sequential performance using the CrystalDiskMark 3.0 software tool...
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Comments
One of the things I wanted to do was test using real files. I chose to use a folder with 6GB of jpg/RAW/and video files. I then compressed that entire folder into a solid RAR archive and tested with that as well. Synthetic benches are fun, but real world file transfers can tell a different story.
All in all a tight review, but I'm wondering why you didn't test the drive using real files, say reading from an SSD and writing to it?
Still, I get your point, and I also wish there was a way to use a standardized set of test files, that everyone could agree on.
I suppose you could save those same files and use them to test other drives also, albeit, with the same drive and rig set up. Or, one could test a number of drives using the same files on any rig, as long as the host drive, to prevent bottlenecking, is faster than the drive being tested. That SSD Olin tested recently would have been a good contender for the host drive, since it is the fastest SSD currently commercially available to the public.