Seagate Barracuda XT 3TB - Good Performance and Great Capacity

A few weeks back, we reviewed Western Digital’s Caviar Green with its humongous 3TB capacity. Nowadays, with all the latest software and games asking for phenomenal storage requirements, it’s clear that larger capacities such as 3TB are soon going to be the norm..  Seagate too has released a similar capacity drive under its Barracuda XT lineup. The XT denotes the performance line of drives. However, will it make for a good purchase for users that are looking for high capacity drives?

Design and Features
There’s nothing unusual of the Barracuda XT’s design. It follows the normal 3.5-inch form factor and weighs about 700 g. It has a SATA 6 GB/s interface and a cache of 64 MB. It offers a 7200 rpm spin speed which is standard for all mainstream performance drives. 

More from Reviews

Best phones under Rs 75,000 (March 2025): Apple iPhone 16, OnePlus 13 to Google Pixel 9 Apple iPhone 16e First Impressions: The budget gateway into Apple Intelligence

Good storage option with decent transfer speeds

The Barracuda XT also comes bundled with a DiscWizard Software which helps motherboards that do not have UEFI BIOS to eliminate the 2.1 TB Legacy issue and read the full 3 TB capacity of the Barracuda XT. While all the latest motherboards will not require this software, it can be quite handy for older PC rigs.

Test Rig Specifications

• Processor: Intel Core i7-2600K CPU @ 3.40 GHz
• Motherboard: GIGABYTE P67A-UD3R
• Memory: Corsair Dominator GT 4 GB DDR3 (2 x 2 GB)
• Hard drive: WD Velociraptor  300 GB
• GPU: ASUS GeForce GTX 580 DirectCU II
• PSU: Cooler Master 1000W

Performance
The Barracuda XT definitely impresses us in terms of performance. The hard drive recorded a drive index of 122.47 MB/s and a random access time of 17.3 ms. While this is only the synthetic tests, we tried some real world file transfer tests as well. Starting off from recording a 4 GB single file from our VelociRaptor to the Seagate Drive, we saw speeds of 107.39 MB/s and for a 4 GB assorted file was transferred at a rate of 95.27 MB/s. Also, transferring files to the Seagate drive we saw a speed of 115.9 MB/s for a 4 GB single file whereas a speed of 84.87 was recorded for a 4 GB assorted file.

Scores

As it can be seen from the performance sheet above, the Barracuda XT does a lot better than the Caviar Green. You can see an approximate of 25 per cent performance boost while transferring 4 GB files between the partitions of the Seagate hard drive.

Verdict
The Seagate Barracuda XT is priced at Rs. 14,900 MRP (Rs. 13,700 MOP) for 3 TB of storage space. Before we come to a conclusion, let us consider a few points of the hard drive. Firstly, the DiscWizard software needs an operating system to utilize the full capacity of the hard drive. Otherwise, although you can use it as a primary drive, the software will detect it as a 2.1 TB hard drive and in the process you end up losing one-third of the Barracuda XT’s capacity. So, it’s advisable that you don’t buy this for a primary hard drive if you’re using a really old system. All the latest motherboards that support UEFI BIOS will be able to recognize the hard drive without a glitch

SATA 3.0 6 GB/s Interface

On the other hand, the Barracuda XT comes like a nice option for a secondary hard drive. Even if you are using a primitive motherboard or a PC rig, with the help of the bundled software you have a lot of storage at your disposal. If you’re looking for performance out of a large capacity drive, this should be the one to go for. If you’re looking at better value, the Caviar Green is the better option. However, 3TB are still not mainstream, so they don’t offer the same bang for your buck as say, a 2TB drive. Finally, although its priced more than the Caviar Green, the performance makes it a worthy buy.