At 4.6 cents per gigabyte, you can’t afford to pass up the Barracuda 3TB.
It’s weird to say this, but the sweet-spot hard drive is the same as the Best of the Best hard drive. The 3TB Seagate Barracuda is the best combination of price, performance, and capacity, whether you’re using it as your only drive or as the backup for a boot SSD. Its sequential read and write speeds of over 150MB/s make it the fastest 7,200rpm drive we’ve ever tested, and its price of $140 means its per-gigabyte cost is only 4.6 cents, making it the best value on the market right now. By contrast, 2TB “Green” drives, which spin at around 5,900rpm, are around $120 from WD and Seagate right now. Why pay more per gigabyte for slower storage? Cost-per-gigabyte goes way up as size goes down, too, especially for any drive under 1TB.
If your budget can’t stretch to $140 and you don’t have an SSD, you’ll want to pri-oritize performance over capacity. Get a 2TB Barracuda (make sure it’s one of the two-platter 7,200rpm ones with 64MB of cache).
At $100, that’s 5 cents per gigabyte. 2TB WD Caviar Black drives, on the other hand, are over $200 at press time.
If you do have an SSD and you only have, say, $85 or $90, get the 1.5TB Barracuda Green from NCIX US. It’s one of the few drives over 1TB that are under $100 right now, though we hope that changes as the in-dustry recovers.
Whether Seagate is engaged in a price war or it just fared better in the Thailand floods of last year, its drive prices are unbeatable at press time, and the 3TB Barracuda is by far the most screaming deal.
SPECIFICATIONS
| Price | Price per Gigabyte | Spin Speed rpm) | Cache (MB) | |
| 3TB Seagate Barracuda | $140 | 0.047 | 7.200 | 64 |
| 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda Green | $70 | 0.047 | 5.900 | 64 |
| 3TB WD Caviar Green | $148 | 0.049 | 5.400 | 64 |
| 2TB Seagate Barracuda | $100 | 0.050 | 7.200 | 64 |
| 2TB Seagate Barracuda Green | $100 | 0.050 | 5.900 | 64 |
| 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda | $82 | 0.055 | 7.200 | 32 |
| 2TB WD Caviar Green | $110 | 0.055 | 5.400 | 64 |
| 3TB HGST Deskstar | $200 | 0.068 | 7.200 | 64 |
| 1TB WD Caviar Blue | $83 | 0.083 | 7.200 | 32 |
| 1TB Seagate Barracuda | $86 | 0.086 | 7.200 | 64 |
| 1TB WD Caviar Green | $89 | 0.089 | 5.400 | 32 |
This is dummy text. It is not meant to be read. Accordingly, it is difficult to figure out when to end it. But then, this is dummy text. It is not meant to be read. Period.
Conversion Conversion Emoticon Emoticon