Seagate Barracuda LP 5900RPM Green SATA 3Gb/s 1TB Hard Drive ST31000520AS Review

Hard drives have been around for along time and they’re taken for granted I think. You can get them in varying sizes and speeds and all of them have their uses. Today for review I have the Seagate Barracuda LP 1TB hard drive which is a green drive that runs at 5900RPM and uses lower power than faster drives of similar size. I’m curious by nature so I put this green drive up against a regular 7200RPM drive for comparison, so let’s get to it…

Info:

Product Name: Barracuda Green SATA 3Gb/s 1TB Hard Drive ST31000520AS

Author: Kristofer Brozio

Provider:  Seagate

Price: $68.99 (from Amazon at time of review)

Key Features and Benefits:
-A unique 5900-RPM speed delivers the fastest-performance eco friendly drive available.
-Seagate SmartAlign technology allows you to get all the benefits of the new Advanced Format 4K sector standard without any hassle–no utilities, no extra steps.
-Low power consumption combined with leadership in the use of environmental compliance materials means you don’t have to sacrifice environmental stewardship for performance.
-Cool, quiet operation

Specifications:
Model Number: ST31000520AS
Interface: SATA 3Gb/s
Cache: 32MB
Capacity: 1TB
Areal density (avg): 341.5Gb/in2
Guaranteed Sectors: 1,953,525,168

PHYSICAL:
Height: 26.1mm (1.028 in)
Width: 101.85mm (4.010 in)
Length: 146.99mm (5.787 in)
Weight (typical): 622g (1.371 lb)

PERFORMANCE:
Spin Speed (RPM): 5900 RPM
Sustained data transfer rate: 95Mb/s
Average latency: 5.1ms
Random read seek time: 16.0ms
Random write seek time: 16.0ms
I/O data transfer rate: 300MB/s

The Review::

It’s a hard drive, it doesn’t look that much different than any other one. Not much to be said about it at all.

 

For comparison I put it up against the Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 1TB hard drive.

 

I ran some quick testing on both drives to see how they compared to each other. One is 7200RPM while the other is 5900RPM, I was certainly curious as to how they compared to one another.

The first test would be Atto:

 

Obviously the 7200.12 is faster as it’s a 7200RPM drive, but speed isn’t really the point with this type of drive is it?

The next test is Crystal DiskMark:

 

101 Read and 99 MB/s Write isn’t bad for a 5900RPM drive I think.

I ran two more tests from SiSoft Sandra 2011 as well.

File Systems

Benchmark mounted file systems (i.e. volumes).

This is not the raw disk performance that other benchmarks test – but the speed of the volume itself that depends on many more factors like file system, operating system cache, position on disk, etc. Thus this is the performance you get at the file system level.

Drive Score: is a composite figure representing an overall performance rating based on the average of the read, write, and seek tests, and file and cache size. It is intended to represent drive performance under typical use in a PC

If we look at this test we see the performance is actually close at the file system level.

Physical Disks

Benchmark hard disks (i.e. the disk itself, not the file system).

As the test measures raw performance it is independent on the file system the disk uses and any volumes mounted off the disk.

Drive Score: is a composite figure representing an overall performance rating based on the highest read or write speed across the whole disk. Thus the higher the better.

Access Time: is the average time to read a random sector on the disk, analogous to latency response time. Thus the lower the better

Here in this test we don’t see any surprises at all, the 7200.12 is faster as expected.

 

One thing I did notice while testing the Barracuda LP is that it can get rather hot to the touch under load, uncomfortably hot actually. What that means exactly I’m not too sure as it feels about the same as the 7200.12 does under load. Still I was expecting a ‘green’ drive to run cooler than a faster one would.

 

 

Conclusion:

I’m not sure I would use the Barracuda LP as my main hard drive as it’s a bit slow really. It might not be bad for an HTPC system but still the heat bothers me a bit for that kind of usage.  Right now I’m using a green drive in my computer for my automatic backups and that’s where I think this drive would fit perfectly.

The drive does power down when not in use it seems and then power back up very quickly when needed.

 

PROS	CONS
+Green, low power drive +Large capacity +Can be SATA 6 gb/s +Decent speeds	-Can get hot to the touch

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Scores::	9 out of 10
Overall:
Aesthetic:
Value / Price:
Build Quality:
Usability:

Disclosure:This product was given to Review the Tech for review by the company for review purposes only, and is not considered by us as payment for the review, we do not, and never will, accept payment from companies to review their products. This product may have also been bought by us for review purposes and does not influence the review.