Seagate Barracuda LP 2TB review

The Barracuda LP is the first internal hard disk from Seagate that we’ve seen that is supposed to be more eco-friendly than other disks. It has a rather unusual spindle speed of 5,900rpm, instead of the more common 5,400rpm or 7,200rpm speed. This spindle speed is supposed to strike a good balance between fast performance and energy efficiency. Although we couldn’t test Seagate’s power efficiency claims, we did put the Barracuda LP through our tough speed benchmarks.

We were sceptical that the 5,900rpm Barracuda LP would be any faster than other 5,400rpm eco-friendly hard disks given the relatively small difference between their spindle speeds. The results of our tests were a mixed bag. They did show that while the Barracuda did manage to get ahead of other eco-friendly disks in some tests, it fell behind in others.

The Barracuda lagged behind the competition when writing large files, managing just less than 78MB/s. It fared much better reading large files with a fast speed of 103.2MB/s. Unfortunately its small files performance was consistently poor. They were written at a slow 42MB/s and read at a slightly quicker but still unremarkable 45.6MB/s. It wasn’t very quick at loading our large Crysis game level either, taking a leisurely 40 seconds to do so.

The Barracuda’s poor performance would be easier to forgive if it were cheaper, but it costs £137, or a high 7p per gigabyte, which is expensive, even for a 2TB hard disk. The warranty is lengthy at five years, but this isn’t enough for us to recommend it with faster disks available for less.