The Seagate BarraCuda (500GB) SSD Review: Getting Back In The Game
by Billy Tallis on December 7, 2018 8:00 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - Light
Our Light storage test has relatively more sequential accesses and lower queue depths than The Destroyer or the Heavy test, and it's by far the shortest test overall. It's based largely on applications that aren't highly dependent on storage performance, so this is a test more of application launch times and file load times. This test can be seen as the sum of all the little delays in daily usage, but with the idle times trimmed to 25ms it takes less than half an hour to run. Details of the Light test can be found here. As with the ATSB Heavy test, this test is run with the drive both freshly erased and empty, and after filling the drive with sequential writes.
The Seagate Barracuda's average data rate on the Light test is the slowest among mainstream SATA drives, at about 15-20% slower overall than the best SATA drives with TLC NAND.
The average latency from the BarraCuda during the Light test is higher than some of the best mainstream drives like the Crucial MX500, but not high enough to be a concern. The 99th percentile latency scores are worse by than most of the competition by at least 1ms, which suggests that the BarraCuda might have some very mild stuttering, but nothing like what the Mushkin Source or ADATA SX950 exhibit when full.
The average read and write latencies from the BarraCuda aren't top notch but still mostly fall within the normal range for mainstream SATA drives. The read latency takes a fairly large hit when the test is run on a full drive, leaving it slower than any recent mainstream drive, but still faster than the two DRAMless SSDs.
The 99th percentile read and write latency scores for the BarraCuda both show that the BarraCuda is slightly slower than its competition, but not by enough to be a serious problem.
The Seagate BarraCuda is the least energy-efficient drive in this bunch, due in part to its low performance, but high power consumption under load is the bigger factor on this test.
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Hulk - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
Fantastic review as always. Thanks for your hard work.But I'm curious as to why the Samsung EVO 860 isn't in the benchmarks. It was recently selling for under $130 (not back at $150) and seems to be the benchmark to which most drives in this category should be compared?
Gasaraki88 - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
The 850 EVO and 860 EVO are very similar in performance.Samus - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
The problem for Samsung's consumer market is they've been making drives that max out the capabilities of SATA for 5 years. There just isn't much more room to improve.And the problem for Samsung's prosumer market is the WD Black NVMe is an overall better value than the 970 NVMe, ESPECIALLY in mobile where the 970's (even the EVO) are so power hungry they constantly throttle in laptops, while reducing battery life.
Samsung is riding on reputation right now. Superior products in the SATA space are irrelevant because at the high end you wont notice a real difference between SATA drives. And in the NVMe space, there are plenty of players on par with Samsung.
zodiacfml - Monday, December 10, 2018 - link
I used to think that SATA is dumb for recent SSDs. However, I noticed that it is only for sequential workloads which can be left running in the background. SATA still has a lot of life for SSDs.The 2.5" form factor is still dumb though. It is huge waste of space and materials.
Can't they make the case the size of the PCB using only the first pair of screws for mounting?
derekullo - Monday, December 10, 2018 - link
The reason this was done was to safe on space knowing that eventually they would deployed in laptops.Another reason was that when ssds were first being released with SLC, they were incredibly expensive and nobody could afford to buy your 1 Terabyte 3.5" drive filled to the brim with SLC nand. Of course we can afford it now ...
derekullo - Monday, December 10, 2018 - link
save on space* be deployed*Billy Tallis - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
My smallest 860 EVO sample is 1TB, and I didn't want to put that on the graphs as the only drive of that capacity. Performance generally increases with drive capacity, so the 1TB would exaggerate the performance advantage of the 860 EVO over the BarraCuda (and probably slightly understate the efficiency advantage). You can make the comparison with our Bench tool if you're interested: https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2201?vs=21...Hulk - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
Okay that makes sense.Death666Angel - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
2.5" SATA SSDs should just become M.2 SATA SSDs with a caddy. :)Dragonstongue - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
not everyone has m.2 on their boards and many of those boards overheat the drive in that slot anyways....t each own, "slow" drives are best kept as full out SATA sized drive (which vast majority are 2.5" anyways. the samsung 8/9xx are "unique" in that the pcb housing the memory chips etc is quite small compared to many so they "easily" put on a m.2 "gum stick"