Seagate is back to the SSD market with their BarraCuda SSD lineup. The drives come in a large variety of capacities, ranging from 250 GB all the way up to 2 TB. These are targeted at consumers and people who are upgrading their system, possibly moving away from a mechanical hard drive to get higher performance at the same time. With a price of $79 for the tested 500 GB variant, the Seagate BarraCuda is one of the most affordable drives on the market.

As the controller, Seagate is using a rebranded Phison PS5010 8-channel controller, which is paired with DRAM—many new, cheap designs skip that to reduce manufacturing cost, with a small performance hit. As flash chips, Seagate has chosen Toshiba 64-layer 3D TLC flash, which results in a very solid design that's still reasonably cheap to produce.

Real-life performance is decent even though it's a few percentile behind competing SATA drives. On average, we see the BarraCuda SSD about 7% slower than high-end 2.5" SATA drives, which is not a lot. The top-end NVMe drives in our test group are up to 20% faster. It seems the lower random write performance of the drive is holding it back in some tests, but the differences are small and certainly not a big deal for light users who rather prefer to have an affordable SSD, or being able to afford a larger capacity with the budget they have available.

A highlight of the BarraCuda is its high sustained write performance despite the small SLC cache of only 4 GB. Other budget SSDs will see their write performance drop significantly once their SLC cache is exhausted. The Seagate BarraCuda does much better here. Even when it has to write directly to TLC flash because SLC is full, its write performance stays high, at around 450 MB/second, which is right up there with more expensive MLC drives. This can be a godsend if you're regularly moving large amounts of data around (more than 20 GB per transfer).

Pricing is where it really gets interesting. Amazon is currently selling the 500 GB variant for only $79, making it one of the most affordable drives on the market. In this bracket, it competes with other drives, like the Crucial BX500 and Mushkin Source we tested not long ago. Such aggressive pricing paired with the great reputation of Seagate and the five year warranty will definitely make this drive interesting for a lot of users. Competition comes from the Crucial MX500 ($90 for 500 GB), which is slightly more expensive, but offers better overall application performance. Basically, it's a tradeoff between trying to keep costs as low as possible and spending a bit more for higher performance, which of course comes at some premium (performance per dollar does not scale equally with cost). For a system that will see only light use, like a system for your parents, an office productivity build, or a media PC, the performance differences should be negligible, and the saved money could go toward other components.