It's been a while since I've reviewed a 2.5" SATA drive—M.2 NVMe SSDs are all the hotness at the moment, while interest for SATA SSDs seems to be down. For me, SATA is still very relevant because these drives are an excellent choice for scenarios that don't benefit a lot from higher transfer rates—like games and many applications. It's also much easier to upgrade your SATA storage because today's motherboards have plenty of SATA ports, but only few M.2 NVMe slots. Personally, I use an M.2 NVMe SSD for my operating system and apps, a HDD for rarely accessed files, almost as archival storage, and several SATA SSDs for things like games, fresh downloads, etc., so I can move files around faster than at HDD speeds while not using up my precious NVMe disk capacity.

Seagate is one of the biggest players in the HDD industry, and they've in my opinion started paying attention to the SSD market fairly late in the cycle. I guess they too eventually realized that flash storage will take away a huge chunk of their business. The Seagate BarraCuda 120 SSD was released in early 2020 to replace the "BarraCuda" SSD that we reviewed back in 2018. I'm not sure if "120" is the best name as uneducated buyers scanning through lists could confuse it for the capacity and dismiss the drive as an option—they're looking for 1 TB, after all.

Under the hood, the Seagate BarraCuda 120 is powered by a rebranded Phison S12 controller paired with 96-layer flash from Intel, and a DRAM cache chip from Nanya. In our real-life tests, the BarraCuda does extremely well for a SATA drive, claiming the #2 performance spot right below the Samsung 850 Pro while being just 1% slower. At this level, the BarraCuda also competes with Crucial's MX500—our favorite price/performance SATA SSD, the Crucial BX300, is only 1% behind, and the BX500 is 25% slower, but more affordable. A typical M.2 NVMe SSD will be around 15% quicker on average, and the fastest M.2 SSDs are up to 25% faster, but the differences very much depend on the actual application.

If we look at individual benchmarks, I have to say I'm impressed. In some tests, the BarraCuda 120 can beat M.2 NVMe drives, especially when the app benefits from random write performance, which is excellent on the BarraCuda. Sequential rates are also worth mentioning since they are pretty much always right at the limit of the SATA interface, which caps out at around 530 MB/s. This is still only a fraction of what is possible with NVMe, but their gains won't translate 1:1 into real-life applications. Random reads on the BarraCuda are a little bit lower than the best SATA drives in our test group, by around 5%, which isn't a big deal.

A very impressive result for the Seagate BarraCuda 120 is its ability to sustain maximum write speed even when huge amounts of data are written. Other TLC-based SSDs, including NVMe variants, achieve their respective maximum write speed only for a short time, until their SLC cache is exhausted. Beyond that, they lower the write rate significantly, sometimes below HDD speeds. The BarraCuda 120, on the other hand, delivers a beautifully constant 500 MB/s, making it the best SATA SSD in this test as it even beats several PCI-Express M.2 NVMe-based models. If you plan on moving a lot of data around on a SATA SSD, this is what you want.

Seagate is pricing their BarraCuda 120 1 TB at $115, which matches the Crucial MX500 1 TB. Both SSDs comes with a five-year warranty. At TechPowerUp we're huge fans of the MX500 because it offers excellent performance at a reasonable price. However, after seeing the BarraCuda 120 results, I can definitely recommend the BarraCuda, too, especially if you plan on writing a lot of data to the drive in a short time and are not willing to wait. I absolutely hate it when I copy a big game around and write speeds start out high only to drop by half or more after a few seconds.

$115 isn't cheap though—there are several alternatives. I would say a better price for the BarraCuda 120 would be around $100, or $105, because $115 already gets you a decent M.2 NVMe SSD. If you need a high-performance option and have an M.2 slot available, that's the way to go. If you are looking at SATA only, the BarraCuda 120 and MX500 would be at the top of my list, Samsung's SSDs are just too expensive with the 870 EVO $140 at the moment—not worth it. Several SSDs from less-known brands are available for around $90, which will be fine for read-heavy loads, and ok for writes if you are willing to wait a bit for them to complete as those will run much slower than on the BarraCuda 120.