The Seagate BarraCuda (500GB) SSD Review: Getting Back In The Game
by Billy Tallis on December 7, 2018 8:00 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - The Destroyer
The Destroyer is an extremely long test replicating the access patterns of very IO-intensive desktop usage. A detailed breakdown can be found in this article. Like real-world usage, the drives do get the occasional break that allows for some background garbage collection and flushing caches, but those idle times are limited to 25ms so that it doesn't take all week to run the test. These AnandTech Storage Bench (ATSB) tests do not involve running the actual applications that generated the workloads, so the scores are relatively insensitive to changes in CPU performance and RAM from our new testbed, but the jump to a newer version of Windows and the newer storage drivers can have an impact.
We quantify performance on this test by reporting the drive's average data throughput, the average latency of the I/O operations, and the total energy used by the drive over the course of the test.
The Seagate BarraCuda SSD is broadly competitive with other TLC SATA drives on The Destroyer, with an average data rate that is clearly slower than the best an MLC drive can deliver but is almost identical to the mainstream Crucial MX500, and significantly higher than the Plextor M8V that pairs Toshiba's 3D TLC with a different controller.
The average and 99th percentile latencies from the Seagate BarraCuda are lower than any of the competing TLC SSDs, and reasonably close to the best we've measured from SATA drives in this capacity class.
The average read and write latencies from the BarraCuda are both among the best we've seen from TLC SATA SSDs, though other current-generation mainstream drives like the Crucial MX500 and Intel 545s aren't significantly behind. The average write latencies in particular vary little among top-tier SATA drives (MLC or TLC).
The 99th percentile read and write latencies show more variation between SATA drives than the averages, and here the Seagate BarraCuda continues to distinguish itself by taking the lead among TLC SATA drives, followed closely by the Intel 545s.
The Seagate BarraCuda's solid performance on The Destroyer comes at the cost of rather high energy usage, almost 40% higher than the Intel 545s that is slightly faster overall. The aging Phison S10 controller is probably the main culprit here, but the Plextor M8V with the same NAND but a Silicon Motion controller is also relatively inefficient on this test.
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Hulk - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
Fantastic review as always. Thanks for your hard work.But I'm curious as to why the Samsung EVO 860 isn't in the benchmarks. It was recently selling for under $130 (not back at $150) and seems to be the benchmark to which most drives in this category should be compared?
Gasaraki88 - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
The 850 EVO and 860 EVO are very similar in performance.Samus - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
The problem for Samsung's consumer market is they've been making drives that max out the capabilities of SATA for 5 years. There just isn't much more room to improve.And the problem for Samsung's prosumer market is the WD Black NVMe is an overall better value than the 970 NVMe, ESPECIALLY in mobile where the 970's (even the EVO) are so power hungry they constantly throttle in laptops, while reducing battery life.
Samsung is riding on reputation right now. Superior products in the SATA space are irrelevant because at the high end you wont notice a real difference between SATA drives. And in the NVMe space, there are plenty of players on par with Samsung.
zodiacfml - Monday, December 10, 2018 - link
I used to think that SATA is dumb for recent SSDs. However, I noticed that it is only for sequential workloads which can be left running in the background. SATA still has a lot of life for SSDs.The 2.5" form factor is still dumb though. It is huge waste of space and materials.
Can't they make the case the size of the PCB using only the first pair of screws for mounting?
derekullo - Monday, December 10, 2018 - link
The reason this was done was to safe on space knowing that eventually they would deployed in laptops.Another reason was that when ssds were first being released with SLC, they were incredibly expensive and nobody could afford to buy your 1 Terabyte 3.5" drive filled to the brim with SLC nand. Of course we can afford it now ...
derekullo - Monday, December 10, 2018 - link
save on space* be deployed*Billy Tallis - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
My smallest 860 EVO sample is 1TB, and I didn't want to put that on the graphs as the only drive of that capacity. Performance generally increases with drive capacity, so the 1TB would exaggerate the performance advantage of the 860 EVO over the BarraCuda (and probably slightly understate the efficiency advantage). You can make the comparison with our Bench tool if you're interested: https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2201?vs=21...Hulk - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
Okay that makes sense.Death666Angel - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
2.5" SATA SSDs should just become M.2 SATA SSDs with a caddy. :)Dragonstongue - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
not everyone has m.2 on their boards and many of those boards overheat the drive in that slot anyways....t each own, "slow" drives are best kept as full out SATA sized drive (which vast majority are 2.5" anyways. the samsung 8/9xx are "unique" in that the pcb housing the memory chips etc is quite small compared to many so they "easily" put on a m.2 "gum stick"