Seagate Barracuda 7200.8: 400GBs with NCQ
by Purav Sanghani on April 20, 2005 4:30 PM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Thermal and Acoustics
Heat and sound are also two very important factors in drive performance especially when considering where they will be used. A loud hard drive that becomes warm very quickly may not be the best choice for home theater PCs or any PC without adequate cooling and the noise alone could be a bit annoying. Take a look at how each drive performed as far as heat and noise output goes.Thermal
Acoustics
To measure the sound output of each drive, we have taken decibel readings as well as recordings of each drive at their startup phase and the sound output while there is disk activity. The recordings can be downloaded below in MP3 format.Hitachi 7K400: startup | activity
Maxtor DiamondMax 10: startup | activity
Maxtor DiamondMax 16: startup | activity
Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9: startup | activity
Samsung SpinPoint 1604N: startup | activity
Samsung SpinPoint 1614C: startup | activity
Samsung SpinPoint 1614N: startup | activity
Seagate Barracuda 7200.7: startup | activity
Seagate Barracuda 7200.8: startup | activity
Western Digital Raptor: startup | activity
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PuravSanghani - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link
mjz5: With our nForce4 platform there is an option under the drive controllers options tab called "Enable command queuing". By checking this option and restarting the system, command queuing will be enabled. Some boards, however, enable NCQ/TCQ by default through the BIOS. You may want to check with your motherboard manual on that.Take care,
Purav
mjz5 - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link
Nighteye2 has a good question. How does NCQ work with RAID arrays? Is it better, worse???How would I know if TCQ is enabled on my 74 raptor?
xsilver - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link
#21 LOL --- you wouldnt want that space anyways even if it was there.... its cant be guaranteed reliable so would you trust 100gb's of your drive that could die at any moment???quorm - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link
I have one of the 300gb 7200.8 drives. It's mentioned in the article that all of the 7200.8 drives use a 3x133gb platter configuration. I was wondering if there is any hack to allow access to the remaining 100gb of disk space. Anyone?AtaStrumf - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link
Hey, where did all the WD drives (apart from Raptor obviously) go??? I can get a 200 GB PATA model pretty cheap, so I'm seriously considering it. Any advice anyone?n7 - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link
Thanx for the review guys :)flatblastard: I'd agree.
The Raptors may not win all the benches, but i find they feel so much snappier than my other 7200RPM drives.
I certainly wouldn't mind adding a 400 Gb Seagate to my collection though :)
bob661 - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link
Can you guys post a UT2004 for load time graph please.flatblastard - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link
I'm using the raptor for my OS, and the 250GB seagate 7200.8 for everything else. I really can't tell which one is faster at loading games...but the raptor is MUCH quicker loading anything else.Icehawk - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link
Where were the heavier real-world multi-tasking tests like in the Intel DC previews? In those articles it appeared that NCQ offered some performance boost in heavy I/O situations - here it seems to offer zero benefit.Houdani - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link
I dunno. Neither the Seagate nor the Maxtor NCQ drive really impressed me. They didn't stand out from the peleton. For most performance needs, I'd have to give the yellow jersey to the Raptor, although the idle heat is a noteworthy ding.For extra capacity one of the larger models would be prudent, but for a primary drive the Raptor is fairly impressive.