Now we have the results provided by HD Tune.

The burst transfer rate from Barracuda XT 2 TB when connected to a SATA-300 port was on the same level as the one achieved by Western Digital Caviar Black 2 TB and Western Digital RE4 2 TB. Seagate Barracuda LP 2 TB, however, achieved a burst rate 12% higher than Barracuda XT 2 TB under this scenario.

When we connected Barracuda XT 2 TB to a SATA-600 port its burst rate increased 12%, being identical to the burst rate achieved by Seagate Barracuda LP 2 TB. As you can see the firmware upgrade made no impact on performance.

According to HD Tune the average transfer rate from Seagate Barracuda XT 2 TB didn’t change with the new firmware version or with the kind of SATA port we used (SATA-300 or SATA-600) and was on the same level of Western Digital Caviar Black 2 TB and Western Digital RE4 2 TB, being 20% faster than Seagate Barracuda LP 2 TB and 44% faster than Western Digital Caviar Green 2 TB.

The maximum transfer rate is achieved when the hard drive is reading data from its outer-most tracks. According to HD Tune the maximum transfer rate from Seagate Barracuda XT 2 TB didn’t change with the new firmware version or with the kind of SATA port we used (SATA-300 or SATA-600).

Here once again Seagate Barracuda XT 2 TB achieved the same performance level as Western Digital Caviar Black and Western Digital RE4.

The minimum transfer rate is achieved when the hard drive is reading data from its inner-most tracks. On this test we saw a performance increase of 16% when running under SATA-600 after we upgraded the firmware.

Here Seagate Barracuda XT 2 TB achieved a performance similar to Western Digital RE4 2 TB, being 4% faster than Western Digital Caviar Black 2 TB.