Seagate Barracuda 7200.8: 400GBs with NCQ
by Purav Sanghani on April 20, 2005 4:30 PM EST- Posted in
- Storage
The Test
In our last few hard drive reviews, we used an Intel based platform that helped eliminate any bottlenecks aside from the hard disk itself. We have since then decided to focus our attention on drive performance on an AMD platform. Again, we chose hardware that would help eliminate any bottlenecks from the CPU, memory, and GPU, and shift them directly to the hard disk drives that we have benchmarked.Our test bed:
AMD Athlon64 3500+ (2.2Ghz)
Giga-byte GA-K8NXP-SLI
NVIDIA 6600GT SLI Edition (single 128MB card)
1GB (512MBx2) Corsair XMS4400
Our motherboard is an nForce4 based board that features support for the SATA II standard, up to 3Gbps/sec SATA transfer rates, and NCQ and TCQ.
We used the following nForce platform drivers in conjunction with our testbed:
nForce4 Chipset Driver 6.31
NVIDIA Forceware 71.89
Windows XP SP1 w/out further updates
Business Winstone IPEAK - a playback test of all of the IO operations that occur within Business Winstone 2004.
Content Creation IPEAK - a playback test of all of the IO operations that occur within Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004.
SYSMark 2004 - the official SYSMark 2004 test suite.
Business Winstone 2004 - the official Business Winstone 2004 test suite.
Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004 - the official Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004 test suite.
Half-Life 2 Level Load Test - a timed test of loading a level in Half-Life 2.
Doom 3 Level Load Test - a timed test of loading a level in Doom 3.
Command & Conquer: Generals Level Load Test - a timed test of loading a level in Command & Conquer: Generals.
Real World File System Task Tests - timed tests of basic file system tasks including zipping/unzipping and copying files.
Service Time and Transfer Rate Tests - Synthetic tests for average service time and transfer rate of hard disk at the beginning and the end of a full disk read.
Business Winstone 2004 Multitasking Test - Synthetic tests for overall system multitasking performance.
Real World Multitasking Test - timed tests of basic multitasking processes, timing a file zip operation while importing Outlook data.
More details about each individual test will appear in the section of the review dedicated to that particular test.
The Competition
Max Capacity |
Platter Density |
# of Platters |
Spindle speed (RPM) |
Average Seek Time |
Average
Latency |
Interface |
Buffer Size |
|
| Seagate 7200.8 (NCQ) |
400GB |
133GB |
3 |
7200 |
8ms |
4.16ms |
SATA |
8MB |
| Seagate 7200.7 | 120GB |
80GB |
2 |
7200 |
8.5ms |
4.16ms |
SATA |
8MB |
| Hitachi 7K400 | 400GB |
80GB |
5 |
7200 |
8.5ms |
4.17ms |
SATA |
8MB |
| Maxtor DiamondMax 10 (NCQ) |
300GB |
60GB |
5 |
7200 |
9.0ms |
4.17ms |
SATA |
16MB |
| Western Digital Raptor 740 | 74GB |
37GB |
2 |
10,000 |
4.5ms |
2.99ms |
SATA |
8MB |
| Samsung SpinPoint SP1614C | 160GB |
80GB |
2 |
7200 |
8.9ms |
4.17ms |
SATA |
8MB |
| Samsung SpinPoint SP1614N | 160GB |
80GB |
2 |
7200 |
8.9ms |
4.17ms |
PATA |
8MB |
| Samsung SpinPoint SP1604N | 160GB |
80GB |
2 |
7200 |
8.9ms |
4.17ms |
PATA |
2MB |
| Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 | 160GB |
80GB |
2 |
7200 |
9.3ms |
4.17ms |
PATA |
2MB |
| Maxtor DiamondMax 16 | 160GB |
80GB |
2 |
5400 |
12.5ms |
4.17ms |
PATA |
2MB |
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StormGod - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link
Hey Anandtech, please make sure your pages are 100% Firefox compatible! While were on the subject, you should really strive to make your pages HTML 4.01 compliant or XHTML 1.0 compliant.cosmotic - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link
I was going to comment on the headings too...SLIM - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link
The shading and color fill behind the headings and drive names is also missing in firefox. You can highlight the column headings to read what they are supposed to say in firefox. Glad I downloaded that ieview extension now.bigboxes - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link
Yup. The column headers for these tables do not show up in Firefox.shoRunner - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link
the column labels don't show up in firefox.shoRunner - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link
PuravSanghani - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link
segagenesis: It seems to be an issue with our sound meter or noise reduction process. We will look into it for our next review. Besides the echo, the recordings should be clear enough to differentiate how each drive sounds.Nighteye2: Your requests will be fulfilled soon. :)
Nighteye2 - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link
You know, with all this talk about NCQ, 1 question has not yet been answered: how does it work with RAID? Can you use NCQ on a RAID system?Also, I'd like to see these tests run on a RAID system, see the performance advantage it gives. Maybe compare 2 cheap, somewhat slower drives in a RAID array against a single HD that you can get for the same price?
segagenesis - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link
The benchmarks are hardly cut and dry yes, but I do enjoy the fact Seagate has a 5 year warranty on drives. This after seeing the industry at one point was putting out 1-year warranty stock on drives and if you paid extra, 3 years.Raptors are the fastest drives ive ever seen but the lack of space keeps them from being all inclusive. I was kind of suprised that the 7200.8 beat out the Raptor as far as game loading went!
Whats with the weird echo-ish sound recordings of the hard drive noise? What on earth did you use to do this?
FreshPrince - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link
man, I need to learn how to use this...anyways...I bought 40 of these drives for my company.16 goes into one raid and another 16 goes into another raid. So far so good, I hear no complaints from my tech guys.
Also, I took 2 and used it as a DFS file server, it's handling 75 users no problems. :-)