This is Seagate's most recent hard drive and their first 4TB consumer offering. With a rotational speed of just 5,900 RPM it's significantly slower than the 7,200 RPM Barracudas that it supersedes. The lower rotational speed results in approximately 10% slower sequential transfer speeds and longer access times which make this drive less suitable for use as a system drive. With peak 4k read/write speeds of 0.76/1.2 MB/s the 4TB HDD.15 lags the group leaders significantly. The HDD.15 is a far better candidate for use in a NAS (Network Attached Storage) where factors such as power consumption and cost per GB are more important than outright speeds. To conclude, the HDD.15 has a relatively disappointing small file 4K performance profile but it does offer a huge amount of storage at a very competitive price which makes it a good candidate for use in a NAS. [Aug '13HDrivePro]
The 1TB Seagate Barracuda 2016 (ST1000DM010) has an impressive performance profile. With Sequential read/writes averaging 173 and 159 MBps respectively, the Barracuda can make short work of even moderately large backups. The small file (4K) performance profile is less impressive but still adequate with average read/writes coming in at 0.87 and 1.53 MBps respectively. For use as OS drives, rotational disks are quickly loosing market share to SSDs which offer orders of magnitude faster 4k read/write speeds. On the other hand cheap TLC based SSDs often have slower sustained write speeds than their rotational counterparts. Reasonably good overall performance can be achieved by using a TLC SSD to host the OS and a larger rotational drive such as the Barracuda for backups and media files. Larger capacity variants of this drive offer both better performance and better value for money. [Feb '17HDrivePro]
We calculate effective speed which measures performance for typical consumers. Effective speed is adjusted by current cost per GB to yield value for money. Our calculated values are checked against thousands of individual user ratings. The customizable table below combines these factors to bring you the definitive list of top HDDs. [HDrivePro]
Welcome to our PC speed test tool. UserBenchmark will test your PC and compare the results to other users with the same components. You can quickly size up your PC, identify hardware problems and explore the best value for money upgrades.