Testing:

I did run into an issue during initial testing on an eVGA 790i motherboard that is worth mentioning before getting into the results. When I connected the Barracuda LP via a free SATA port the first thing I did was create an FAT32 partition in Linux Mint 6 using Gparted. Then I booted into Windows XP SP2 to run the benchmark tests.

I got various errors during the tests, so I decided to format the drive in Windows, but had to opt for NTFS due to the fact the partition I wanted was over 32GB. That also threw up an error! I was thinking I had a bad drive, so I downloaded SeaTools and ran some of those tests on the drive. Some tests passed, but others failed. I was so confused, I tried other SATA ports (which didn't help), connected via USB (which worked well), and even tested on another 790i system with the same errors. I finally connected to a motherboard with a different chipset and everything was perfectly fine. There must be an issue with the onboard SATA on the 790i motherboards as it relates to hardware in this drive.



The Seagate Barracuda LP 2TB SATA hard drive was then installed in a system with the following components for this review:

» AMD Athlon X2 Dual-Core 6000+ processor
» AMD Stock CPU Cooler
» ASUS M2N-E ATX motherboard
» Corsair XMS2 4GB (2x2GB) 800MHz DDR2 memory
» Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 160GB SATA II hard drive
» Antec EarthWatt 500W power supply
» HP nVidia Quadro FX560 video card
» SAMSUNG 20x DVD Burner with LightScribe
» Windows XP Professional SP2

Testing consisted of running through a couple benchmark applications, as well as conducting real life power consumption cost testing and thermal testing.

The following list details the tests to be executed:

» HD Tach 3.0.4.0
» HD Tune 2.55
» SiSoft Sandra 2009.5.15.99
» Power Consumption Testing
» Thermal Testing

For comparison purposes, the following drive was used in order to provide a comparison with the Barracuda LP 2TB drive:

» Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1TB SATA hard drive