| Seagate Barracuda 3TB Hard Drive ST3000DM001 |  |
| Reviews - Featured Reviews: Storage | |
| Written by Olin Coles | |
| Tuesday, 01 November 2011 | |
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PCMark Vantage HDD TestsPCMark Vantage is an objective hardware performance benchmark tool for PCs running 32- and 64-bit versions of Microsoft Windows Vista or Windows 7. PCMark Vantage is well suited for benchmarking any type of Microsoft Windows Vista/7 PC: from multimedia home entertainment systems and laptops, to dedicated workstations and high-end gaming rigs. Benchmark Reviews has decided to use the HDD Test Suite to demonstrate simulated real-world storage drive performance in this article. PCMark Vantage runs eight drive tests, each with a specific purpose. Once the benchmarking test were complete, the results are given a PCMark score while the detailed result show actual transaction speeds. Our tests were conducted on an Intel P67 Sandy Bridge motherboard using the onboard SATA 6Gb/s controller with 64-bit Windows 7. Results are displayed in the chart below:
Seagate Barracuda XT 3TB Hard Drive ST33000651AS (Five-Platter)
Seagate Barracuda 3TB Hard Drive ST3000DM001 (Three-Platter)Each drive has a small advantage depending on the task: the older five-platter Seagate Barracuda XT ST33000651AS did well with importing pictures into Windows Photo Gallery, but the new three-platter Seagate Barracuda ST3000DM001 excelled at video editing with Windows Movie Maker and Windows Media Center. Overall the new hard drive performed better in most tests, and scored a notably higher PCMark Vantage rating. Based on these results, the new Seagate Barracuda ST3000DM001 does improve real-world performance by using three 1TB platters instead of five. In the next section I share my conclusion and final product rating.
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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.