Seagate Barracuda 2TB ST2000DM001

The Seagate ST2000DM001 is a two terabyte Serial ATA 3.0 hard drive that retails for less than $90 USD and is the subject of this weekend's benchmarks at Phoronix.

I've already been running one of these ST2000DM001 drives in a local server within my office but in picking up another one this week for the same system, I decided to run some fresh benchmarks and say a few words about it since I previously hadn't commented on this Seagate 2TB HDD on Phoronix. The first drive continues to work well and is used for file storage and is encrypted on Linux using dmcrypt and the file-system is Btrfs while enabling LZO transparent compression.

The Seagate Barracuda ST2000DM001 has a Serial ATA 3.0 (6Gb/s) interface with Native Command Queuing (NCQ), a 64MB cache, 7200RPM spin rate, Seagate AcuTrac technology, and Seagate OptiCache technology. Seagate advertises this Barracuda HDD as being applicable for desktops/all-in-ones, home servers, PC gaming systems, RAID systems, and NAS/DAS devices.

To no major surprise, there were no Linux issues in getting this 2TB HDD to be detected or properly work on modern Linux distributions. For the purposes of this article, we benchmarked the Seagate Barracuda 2TB ST2000DM001 against a range of other SATA hard drives when running Ubuntu 14.04 x86_64 and upgrading to the Linux 3.14 Git kernel while testing each of the HDDs using a freshly-formatted Btrfs file-system with default mount options.

The Seagate ST2000DM001 retails for $80~90 USD for the 2TB version while there's also other storage capacities ranging from 250GB up through 4TB of storage. The selection of drives used for this quick, weekend article were just an assortment of spare drives laying around the office:

- Western Digital WD1500HLHX-0 (Western Digital VelociRaptor WD1500HLHX) that is a SATA 3.0 disk spinning at 10,000 RPMs with a 32MB cache.

- Western Digital WD10EARS-00M Caviar Green 1TB 5400RPM Serial ATA hard drive.

- Seagate ST3320620AS an older Barracuda 7200.10 Serial ATA 2.0 hard drive with Serial ATA 2.0 interface and 16MB of cache.

- Western Digital WD5000AZRX-0 Green 500GB Serial ATA 3.0 hard drive with 64MB cache.

- Seagate ST2000DM001-1E61 -- the drive that's the focus of today's review -- with 2TB storage capacity, Serial ATA 3.0 interface, 7200 RPM, and 64MB cache.