SATA3 test: Gigabyte P55a-UD6 and Barracuda XT 2TB

With an Intel Core i7 870 and a Gigabyte P55a-UD6 mainboard hardcoreware.net tested the Barracuda XT 2 TeraByte (SATA3) internal harddisk.


In the benchmarks the 2TB Barracuda XT was compared to the 1TB Seagate 7200.12 (SATA2).

The windows 7 FileCopy benchmarks were performed by the Intel P55 chipset as well as the onboard Marvell SE9128 SATA3 controller chip for both drives. In most cases the 7200.12 also had a faster performance when the operations were carried out by the Marvell chip, allthough the 7200.12 is a 3GB/s disk.

To give you an Idea we give you the results of the windows 7 x64 File copy test were 2.08GB misc. files (many small files and some large ones).

1. With the P55 the results for the 7200.12 were 34.84MB/second and the Barracuda XT 39.68MB/second.

2. With the Marvell SATA3 controller the results for the 7200.12 were 42.24MB/second and the Barracuda XT 50.66MB/second.

In the 'real world' Windows FileCopy Benchmarks the XT outperforms the rest, and the 7200.12 is (a somewhat) faster when connected to the Marvell. The HDTach benches for average read/write show a different result, it doesn't matter if the P55 or the Marvell is uesed the results are roughly the same.


The overall conclusion for this drive is that there is a hardly a performance gain compared to a SATA2.0 drive. The 2TB Barracuda XT ranges from “pretty much identical” to “a little bit faster” than the SATA2 drive it was compared with in the tests.