0 of 5

After a long stay at the 2TB highwater mark, manufacturers finally started trickling out 3TB drives in late 2010. The Sandy Bridge platform has eliminated a big barrier to entry for 3TB bootable drives by offering UEFI. And now 7,200rpm 3TB drives have arrived. Here we pit Hitachi's 3TB Deskstar against Seagate's Barracuda XT 3TB to see which is most worthy of your dollars and data.

HITACHI DESKSTAR 7k3000 3TB

Alas, poor Hitachi; we knew him well, Horatio. Hitachi's Global Storage division might have been gobbled up by Western Digital, but it's still putting out product, at least for now. Hitachi's latest addition to the Deskstar line is a five-platter, 3TB, 7,200rpm drive with 64MB of cache and a 6Gb/s SATA interface. Yeah, we can deal with that.

Hitachi's Deskstar ships with a piece of paper directing users to download the Hitachi GPT Disk Manager from Paragon Software. The boot solution for legacy users seems to be to just divide the disk into separate partitions. We expect Maximum PC readers can manage the same with Windows' built-in tools—although we're not sure how many Maximum PC readers want to boot from a 3TB partition in their desktop rigs.

On our Sandy Bridge test bed, which has UEFI, we had no problem creating a 3TB bootable partition and installing 64-bit Windows 7; we didn't even need to load F6 drivers. We ran our standard mechanical-drive benchmarks on the Deskstar and found average sustained read speeds of around 119.5MB/s and write speeds around 118.5MB/s. In both our Premiere Pro encoding test, which writes a 20GB uncompressed AVI to the disk, and the PCMark Vantage HDD subtest, the Deskstar performed faster than the Barracuda XT, despite having largely the same specs and despite the Barracuda's faster average read and write speeds. The Deskstar's randomaccess speeds were fully 2ms faster than the Barracuda's.

With an MSRP of $250 and faster real-world scores than the Seagate Barracuda XT, the Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000 is a real winner.

SEGATE BARRACUDA XT 3TB

Seagate's Barracuda line has long been a contender in the 7,200rpm drive space and—7200.11 firmware snafu notwithstanding—has generally vied with WD's Caviar Black line for the 7,200rpm crown. The Barracuda XT 3TB is a five-platter 7,200rpm drive with 6Gb/s SATA and 64MB of cache, just like the Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000. So what's the difference? 

Like the Hitachi drive, but unlike WD's Caviar Green, the Barracuda XT ships sans hardware adapter, instead offering a link to rebranded partitioning software. In this case, Seagate offers the Seagate DiscWizard, powered by Acronis. Again, it doesn't offer much functionality beyond that provided by Windows, but it is easier for novice users. Those with 64-bit operating systems, UEFI-enabled motherboards, and GPT partitions won't even need that.

In our low-level disk benchmarks, the Seagate Barracuda XT offered sequential read and write speeds exceeding 120MB/s, while random-access times lagged a few milliseconds behind both the Hitachi Deskstar and WD Caviar Green 3TB drives. In Premiere Pro and PCMark Vantage, though, the Barracuda's scores were slightly slower than those of the Hitachi Deskstar—12 seconds slower in Premiere Pro and around 600 PCMarks (whatever those are) behind the