The Seagate Barracuda LP 2 TeraByte drive is a low-power drive, meant to conserve power. So it spins at a curiously unique speed of 5900 rotations per minute, as against prevailing speeds of spinning at 5400 and 7200 RPM, and has a 32 MB buffer. It is a cousin of the mainstream Barracuda 7200.12 series of drives, and thus stores 500 GB per platter, using four platters in total – similar to all other 2TB drives on the market currently. Conventional wisdom would say that more platters equates to more heat generated but this drive barely got warm to the touch.
Vibration is almost non-existent in single-drive configurations, but pairing this drive with another similar one caused a fair bit of vibration in a desktop PC, although still tolerable. This drive, although fast, is not targeted at the performance market, and is good for use in HTPC (home-theater PC), NAS boxes, and other such purposes where the drive’s data capacity is important. Seagate claims power usage of 3.3W at idle and 6.8W during operation, which is good for saving power if you are replacing multiple smaller drives with this one.
The Barracuda LP 2TB spins at a lower speed than the Barracuda 7200.12 series, so we didn’t expect it to get anywhere close to their performance numbers, but we were pleasantly surprised. We run synthetic benchmarks and real world tests on a high-end test-bench to eliminate bottlenecks. We measured a read speed average of 91.9 MB/s, and write speed average of 89.5 MB/s. Real world file read/write speeds stood at 104.35 MB/s for a single large file (6.42 GB), but fell to 72.3 MB/s as expected, when copying multiple smaller files (1287 files totaling up to 2.33 GB). Transferring files from the first partition to a second on the same drive was at a poor speed of 13.79 MB/s. Read and write access times averaged 15.8 ms and 8.97 ms (milli-seconds) respectively. These performance numbers are good and are only slightly lower than today’s best mainstream desktop hard drives. To get a rough idea of what the performance of this drive could have been if it spun at a normal 7200RPM, you only need to take a look at the Seagate Barracuda XT 2TB.
Due to the difference in the way drive capacities are calculated (decimal by manufacturers, versus binary by your PC’s OS), all 2TB drives on the market only provide 1863 GB. This increasing gap between decimal and binary capacity gets quite shocking as you reach higher capacities, and we now see the same “calculation policy” being applied to SSDs as well now. It will be interesting to see what solution is worked out by the storage industry. Seagate offers a three-year warranty on this drive.
Bottom Line:
Those who want to say “I have a multi-Terabyte hard disk” would be quite pleased with this drive. A single HDD with such high densities is also useful for those building themselves a HTPC/NAS box. It sips less power than normal 7200RPM drives, without very much of a hit to performance. But the high capacity definitely incurs a price premium, costing just a bit more than the price of two normal (7200rpm) 1TB hard drives.
