Seagate BarraCuda Fast SSD review: Stylish, but slow for the price - choiwhyall

At a Peek

Expert's Rating

Pros

• Attractive design
• Excellent SuperSpeed USB 5Gbps execution
• Sync software

Cons

• Slower than similarly priced NVMe-based USB SSDs

Our Verdict

For a SATA-based SuperSpeed USB 10Gbps SSD, the BarraCuda Loyal is a very good performer. It's too handsome. But you could father a much quicker NVMe-based drive for just about the same price.

Seagate's BarraCuda Fast SSD lives up to its name, but only if you're talking about external USB storage with SATA drives inside from a couple of years ago. Most vendors have affected on to NVMe internals, to take advantage of the double bandwidth SuperSpeed USB 10Gbps offers.

That wouldn't be a big cheese if the BarraCuda Fast SSD were cheaper, but it's priced nearly the indistinguishable as NVMe drives such as the Samsung T7.

This review is part of our ongoing roundup of the best SSDs. Go there for information on competitory products and how we tested them.

Design, pricing and details

Most outward drives opt for a rectangular shape, merely the Seagate BarraCuda Fast SSD marches to a unusual drummer. A squarish drummer, as the drive is active a half-column inch yearner in unmatchable direction. In fact, I hatred to say it, merely it made a very nice coaster for my desk.

The BarraCuda Fast SSD is getable in three capacities: 500GB ($110 along AmazonRemove non-intersection link), the 1GB size we proved ($180 on Amazon), and 2TB ($350 on AmazonRemove non-product link), respectively. It's billed as a USB-C drive, which tells you nothing other than it sports Type-C connecter. As mentioned, the USB is SuperSpeed 10Gbps. As mentioned, the drive engineering science is SATA, non NVMe, as with some of the only slimly pricier competition.

The drive carries a three-year warranty. Seagate doesn't offer a TBW (TeraBytes that can be Written) rating, however, for the formula exploiter, that shouldn't be a concern. SSDs are outlasting estimates in droves.

Matchless design detail stupefied me: The Type-C port is located on the same conclusion of the drive as the thin, green LED band. If your cable orients the tug in the wrong management, you can't see the hail-fellow-well-met Kermit-like lighting. Habits vary, only I would've put the port happening the other end, or the side.

The drive ships with the Seagate Toolkit software, which is handy for syncing data to the drive. Alas, it won't allow you to change the colourise of the LED A you can with the  Seagate Gaming SSD.

Performance

The BarraCuda Fast SSD lives awake to the second part of its list—inside the limits (or so 550Mbps) of its SATA internals. It's rapid, though not quite as speedy As Samsung's three year-old T5. The results were so close, nonetheless, that carrying into action real shouldn't equal the deciding factor.

IDG

CrystalDiskMark 6 pegs the BarraCuda as a quicker writer, but slower reader, than the Samsung T5. Longer bars are better.

As you throne see above, CrystalDiskMark gave the BarraCuda Fast a gracious bound in write functioning, and a statistically orthogonal deficit in reading.

IDG

The BarraCuda Fast largely held its possess agains the Samsung T5. Shorter bars are better.

The BarraCuda Loyal also played second violin to the T5 in the 48GB tests (above), but pierced over a minute disconnected of the T5's 450GB copy prison term as shown below.

IDG

Where the BarraCuda Hurried excelled was in endurance. Writing 450GB it was more than a minute quicker than the Samsung T5. Shorter bars are better.

The BarraCuda Fast is a identical good performing artist for a SATA-based drive, but thus is the T5. However, there's that pricing issue once again—much faster NVMe-supported USB SSDs, so much as  the SanDisk Extreme Portable Pro SSD and Samsung T7, price only a undersized more. The graphic below shows just how much faster in casual use the competition is. Twice the performance for another $10? Yup.

IDG

The BarraCuda Fast holds its own against SATA-based drives, but can't hold a taper to NMVe-based SSDs much as the Extreme Portable Pro SSD and Samsung T7 (though the latter slows downbound quite an bit on long copies). Longer bars are break.

Note that the Samsung T7 will decelerate quite an a bit when its lay away runs impossible, but for most purposes, information technology's significantly faster. The SanDisk Extreme Portable Pro SSD is well the fastest of three.

Testing is performed on Windows 10 64-bit running on a Core i7-5820K/Asus X99 Deluxe system with four 16GB Kingston 2666MHz DDR4 modules, a Zotac (Nvidia) GT 710 1GB x2 PCIe graphics card, and an Asmedia ASM2142 USB 3.1 Gen 2 (10Gbps) card. Also on board are a Gigabyte Gigacycle per second-Mountain chain Thunderbolt 3 card and Softperfect's Ramdisk 3.4.6, which is used for the 48GB translate and write tests.

A fastidious aim, but…

I comparable the Seagate BarraCuda Fast SSD. There's clean something about the styling, and yes, the Light-emitting diode highlighting, that's quite appealing. It's also a good performer for the the technology involved. At a lower price point, I'd be wholly over information technology.

All the same, you can get twice the performance for only a bit more. That, my friends, makes it a bit tough to recommend the BarraCuda Fast SSD. Unless of course, you're dead-set on the estimate that IT's hip to be squared.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/399288/seagate-barracuda-fast-ssd-review.html

Posted by: choiwhyall.blogspot.com

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