Seagate BarraCuda Pro 14TB HDD Review: Massive Storage for Desktops
by Ganesh T S on September 10, 2018 8:01 AM ESTPerformance - Direct Attached Storage Mode
Seagate also sells the BarraCuda Pro Compute drives as being suitable for use in direct-attached storage systems. We evaluated the performance in such a usage scenario using one of the highest performing 2-bay DAS units currently in the market - the Akitio Thunder3 Duo Pro, connected to our testbed via a Thunderbolt 3 interface.
Prior to processing real-life workloads, we first checked quick artificial access traces using ATTO and CrystalDiskMark.
We find that the performance remains consistent irrespective of workload size as long as the sequential access characteristic holds. Two drives in RAID 0 can sustain 520 MBps+ reads and writes. RAID 1 performance is similar to the standalone drive performance.
Both RAID0 and RAID1 configurations were subject to our standard DAS test suite described in the previous section. The robocopy test suite gave the following results.
| Akitio Thunder3 Duo Pro + 2x Seagate BarraCuda Pro 14TB (Thunderbolt 3) robocopy Benchmarks (MBps) |
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| Write Bandwidth | Read Bandwidth | |||
| RAID 0 | RAID 1 | RAID 0 | RAID 1 | |
| Photos | 299.52 | 182.11 | 383.84 | 196.73 |
| Videos | 400.26 | 214.63 | 400.44 | 203.24 |
| Blu-ray Folder | 423.90 | 218.47 | 403.24 | 206.67 |
There is no difference in the performance consistency between either RAID configuration. The behavior is largely similar to the internal drive scenario, except for the RAID 0 absolute bandwidth numbers. Thanks to the enclosure's fan, the temperature increase is also not as much as what we observed in the internal drive case, though we do see the temperatures in the RAID 1 case being slightly more than the RAID 0 case due to the workload distribution.
We also processed select workloads from PCMark 8's storage bench.
| Akitio Thunder3 Duo Pro + 2x Seagate BarraCuda Pro 14TB (Thunderbolt 3) PCMark8 Storage Benchmarks (MBps) |
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| Write Bandwidth | Read Bandwidth | ||||
| RAID 0 | RAID 1 | RAID 0 | RAID 1 | ||
| Adobe Photoshop (Light) | 297.55 | 206.27 | 10.26 | 9.31 | |
| Adobe Photoshop (Heavy) | 319.36 | 197.92 | 12.31 | 10.67 | |
| Adobe After Effects | 97.82 | 65.30 | 9.49 | 9.12 | |
| Adobe Illustrator | 224.29 | 178.66 | 9.06 | 8.81 | |
A significant speed-up in response time is achieved while dealing with multimedia files stored in a RAID 0 configuration of two BarraCuda Pro 14TB drives in a Thunderbolt 3 enclosure. Combined with the consistency shown, we can say that our results back up Segate's claims regarding the firmware tuning of BarraCuda Pro drives for specific application scenarios.
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SSTANIC - Monday, September 10, 2018 - link
First. Why is there no sound/noise paragraph? What does this drive have that a Seagate Exos SATA 14TB enterprise drive doesn't have? Why is the price set so high for 10/12/14TB HDDs? How do I turn off video autoplay on anandtech.com please? Turning it off in Chrome doesn't seem to do it. Tnxsvan1971 - Monday, September 10, 2018 - link
Ublock Origin deals the videos and ads very well.xenol - Monday, September 10, 2018 - link
Autoplaying HTML5 videos, if it is such, is a browser feature. Out of the box, your options are "yes" or "no." And while it's tempting to say "no" it presents another problem: YouTube and other streaming sites that switched to HTML5 won't automatically start playing.FLHerne - Monday, September 10, 2018 - link
Browsers with autoplay enabled will only start HTML5 elements containing an 'autoplay' attribute -- i.e. it's Anandtech's choice to have their videos start playing for no reason unless we disable the feature globally.Even on YouTube it can be annoying sometimes.
GreenReaper - Tuesday, September 11, 2018 - link
Firefox is doing it so that you can select per-site now, as well as globally. Not sure about Chrome.PeachNCream - Monday, September 10, 2018 - link
The autoplaying video is one of AT's worst moves. For those of us that want to support the site by allowing additional advert content, it comes off as a kick in the face. It doesn't appear that there will be any sort of response. Download Firefox, grab Adblock, and get NoScript. Between those two you'll have a much happier browsing experience and you'll get away from Chrome acting as a conduit on your PC to enable Google to creep on everything you do through your web browser.kaidenshi - Monday, September 10, 2018 - link
I think uBlock Origin would be a better choice than Adblock, whose creators get a kickback from ads they whitelist which goes against the whole point of having an ad blocker.You can actually turn off autoplay HTML5 videos in Firefox by going to about:config and setting media.autoplay.enable to "False".
PeachNCream - Tuesday, September 11, 2018 - link
You can easily turn off the whitelist in Adblock. I didn't know about the autoplay disable functionality though. That's actually quite useful so thank you!rahvin - Monday, September 10, 2018 - link
You should remember AT was sold recently to a major aggregator, you should expect more of this autoplay BS not less. Maybe it's time to find a new review site?milkod2001 - Tuesday, September 11, 2018 - link
'For those of us that want to support the site by allowing additional advert content'it does not really matter if you allow it or not. What matters for them is to get you to click on them ads. If you only allow ad and don't click you are not helping them :)