Seagate Barracuda 7200.8: 400GBs with NCQ
by Purav Sanghani on April 20, 2005 4:30 PM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Final Words
So, is Seagate's new NCQ enabled 400GB monster worth the dollars that consumers will be asked to put up for it? The answer is not as cut and dry as we would want. Many factors come into play when choosing a hard disk drive, such as overall performance and reliability. To have a 400GB drive and have it fail when we need it the most is grounds to pay a little extra for that more reliable unit, especially when working with sensitive data.Performance can vary greatly among hard drives and, as we have learned over the last few years benchmarking hard disk drives, results are never set in stone. A hard drive can perform extremely well during the first run, but may come close to last in the third or fourth run of a benchmark. There is no single test that can measure the performance of a drive by itself and be accurate enough to use the results thereafter. This is why we have chosen a long list of benchmarks to test each drive - synthetic as well as real world.
As we ran our first benchmark, the synthetic IPEAK pure hard disk performance test, we knew that the 7200.8 would not be the best drive on our list. It did extremely well in Content Creation tests performed with the SYSMark 2004 and WinStone 2004 suites, but could not keep up with the Raptor in Business and Office Productivity tests.
The 7200.8 as well as the 7200.7 did do well in our Real World Game Level Load Time tests with Doom 3 and Half-Life 2, loading Doom 3's caverns1 map in 32.394 seconds with the 7200.7 following closely, and loading Half-Life 2's d1_canals_01 map just inside the 16-second mark, much better than the DiamondMax and SpinPoint drives.
Native Command Queuing was the focus with Seagate's 7200.8 and we ran a few multitasking benchmarks to see how it performs against the others. We first ran the Multitasking Performance test in the Business Winstone 2004 suite and found that Maxtor's DiamondMax 10 NCQ drive came in at first place with an overall multitasking performance rating of 2.95. The Raptor followed, of course, most likely due to its Tagged Command Queuing feature. The Seagate came in at third in multitasking, which doesn't knock it out of the competition, but rather makes it a worthy competitor.
Disk capacity is the biggest attraction to the 7200.8 Barracuda. With only two manufacturers designing drives with capacities of 400GB+ (500GB - Hitachi's 7K500), the questions that should be asked are "How much space do I need and how much am I willing to pay for it?"
Seagate has designed a great drive that has been proven to compete with the 10,000RPM Raptor and Maxtor's newest NCQ enabled drive with a 16MB buffer. Though it doesn't win all of the tests, it does give the other units a run for their money. Seagate also backs their drives with a 5-year warranty, which is the lengthiest in the hard drive industry.
At the time of publication, the Seagate 7200.8 400GB Barracuda retails for around $330. But if you don't mind 100GB less disk space and want a 16MB buffer for that extra punch, the OEM version of Maxtor's DiamondMax 10 or MaXLine III retails for just under $200.
Special thanks to NewEgg.com for providing us with the products for this review.
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zforgetaboutit - Thursday, May 26, 2005 - link
The review has a table showing the drives' spec sheets. Among the stats are "average seek times (AST)". But I don't see average seek times benchmarked, as such.So, on the one hand, the Seagate's spec shows an AST of 8.x seconds, but other reviews have shown it to be 11+ seconds.
I propose that if the review goes as far as to publish the purported AST, then it has an obligation to test it as well, with a discrete benchmark, such as HDTach or some other explicit AST benchmark.
Otherwise companies will start to claim 2 ms AST, and Anandtech won't be able to refute it, if it's a blatantly bogus claim.
OrSin - Tuesday, April 26, 2005 - link
I see you explain how you take your sound measurements, but you really need to do it differently. The raptors are load as hell and seagate are queit and accourding to measure they are equal? Serious I undestand your reasoning for it, but it's just flawed. If a test seems right but produces obviously (and I mean obviously) wrong results then you need a new method.I had to send a raptor back it was so loud. I had to look at my computer (SFF) evertime i booted up to make sure it was going to rock off the table. Now my computer was a not actually moving but it sounding like it vibrating enough to move.
Zak - Monday, April 25, 2005 - link
Your articles are often difficult to read due to your use of some weird convoluted sentence structure. Why can't you guys use simpler, more accessible language??? Exampple:"RPM, or revolutions per minute, is the measure of instances that the motor of the hard drive can rotate the platters by a full 360 degrees."
How about:
"RPM, or revolutions per minute, the speed of platter rotation: how many times the platters rotate every minute." or something like that.
Zak
JPSJPS - Monday, April 25, 2005 - link
Purav Sanghani - Poster 32 and especially poster 33 pointed out an obvious mistake that only a complete newbie would make. This makes all of your data questionable!!! Have you considered having someone with a little technical knowledge review your stuff before you publish it?PuravSanghani - Friday, April 22, 2005 - link
TrogdorJW: The recordings as well as decibel readings were taken 1" away from the side of each drive. Obviously the sound emitted from the drives would not be as loud when inside a sealed case, but to get an accurate reading of the sound emissions from each drive and comparing them to each other requires that we take readings close to each unit.smn198: You are right, the frequency of the sound produced by each drive does make a world of difference. In the past when looking at case fans, we observed that larger 120mm fans are quieter than smaller 80mm fans because they produce a lower frequency which is less noticeable to humans. This is definitely the case with anything that produces any sound, including hard drives.
ohnnyj - Friday, April 22, 2005 - link
I want to know how you get Photoshop to open in under seven seconds on a Raptor. My RAID0 array opens in about 14-15. It opens faster if you open, close, then reopen again so I wonder if this is how the test was performed.Phantronius - Friday, April 22, 2005 - link
Just bought 2 160gig Barracuda's to replace my noisey as hell Western Digitals. I freaking love them, soooooo much quieter.TrogdorJW - Thursday, April 21, 2005 - link
A few things to note on noise (from my perspective):1) The hard drive noise levels were probably taken very close to the drives in order to capture them. Just FYI. 52 to 54 dBA is rather loud. Purav, what was the distance of your SPL meter from the drives?
2) Seek noise can be very noticeable. My own experience reflects what's in the charts, with the Samsung being the quietest. Seagate and Hitachi are moderately loud, and the Maxtor and Western Digital Raptor are the loudest. (Raptor seek noise sounds louder to me than what's in the recordings.) I don't know about the decibel ratings, but it seems like if you started the charts at 50 that it would reflect more what I hear. (i.e. Samsung would be 1.2 to 2.4 and Hitachi would be 1.6 to 4.4)
3) Bearing noise is generally either near-silent (Samsung, Seagate, and just about any other FDB implementation, including the Raptors) or else it's noticeable. The WDxxxxBB/JB models are notorious for having a lot of bearing noise, as are older Maxtor drives. I've got four WD's at my place, and I hate them all! :-p (They're a bit faster in a lot of tests, but they're too noisy.)
4) Ignoring the echo in the recordings (MP3 compression can cause some funky artifacts), listen to the Maxtor 10 - Ouch! That thing is killer loud.
JonB - Thursday, April 21, 2005 - link
Since my motherboard SATA controllers don't support NCQ, I have three choices. Leave it disabled (which doesn't seem so bad in some respects), get a new motherboard, or add a Promise or Adaptec PCI controller card.Anybody got experience with an add-in Promise RAID with NCQ support???
smn198 - Thursday, April 21, 2005 - link
#28 - "Maybe we're seeing no boost with NCQ because of poor implementation, who knows. Testing with just one platform will not reveal such issues."I seem to remember Anand saying the opposite
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?...
"What's truly impressive, however, is the reduction in average response time - up to a 90ms decrease in response time, thanks to NVIDIA's superior NCQ implementation. "
However, Anand did mention that NVIDIA took the decision not to 'turn on' NCQ until the queue depth had exceeded a certain amount. (Cannot remember which article that was in.) It may be that in some of these tests, this queue depth was not exceeded.
#30 - "How is the 7200.7 120Gb drive louder then a Raptor? My 7200.7 120Gb drive is near SILENT, no where loud as a Raptor. I think your measuring device is off forthe Acoustics test."
This may be due to the fact that the noise the Raptor emits is at a different, more audible frequency.