Seagate BarraCuda Fast SSD review: Stylish, but slow for the price
Seagate’s BarraCuda Fast SSD lives up to its name, but only if you’re talking about external USB storage with SATA drives inside from a couple of years ago. Most vendors have moved on to NVMe internals, to take advantage of the doubled bandwidth SuperSpeed USB 10Gbps offers.
That wouldn’t be a big deal if the BarraCuda Fast SSD were cheaper, but it’s priced nearly the same as NVMe drives such as the Samsung T7.
This review is part of our ongoing roundup of the best SSDs. Go there for information on competing products and how we tested them.
Most external drives opt for a rectangular shape, but the Seagate BarraCuda Fast SSD marches to a different drummer. A squarish drummer, as the drive is about a half-inch longer in one direction. In fact, I hate to say it, but it made a very nice coaster for my desk.
The BarraCuda Fast SSD is available in three capacities: 500GB ($110 on Amazon), the 1GB size we tested ($180 on Amazon), and 2TB ($350 on Amazon), respectively. It’s billed as a USB-C drive, which tells you nothing other than it sports Type-C connector. As mentioned, the USB is SuperSpeed 10Gbps. As mentioned, the drive technology is SATA, not NVMe, as with some of the only slightly pricier competition.
