Seagate 7200.9 160GB: The Highest Platter Density to Date!
by Purav Sanghani on January 31, 2006 10:29 PM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Final Words
Performance-wise, the 160GB 7200.9 is not a top performer when it comes to game level loading and File Zip and Unzip operations, but it's still far from the bottom of the barrel. Seagate's newest platter design, at 160GB, proves to be a worthy competitor in the long list of hard disk drives that we have benchmarked over the last few years.
We also benchmarked a couple of these drives in a RAID-0 array as a brief look at RAID performance with results that were pleasing to our eyes. The 160GB unit churned out 561 operations per second in our Business Winstone 2004 IPEAK capture benchmark and 378 operations per second in the Content Creation portion of that benchmark. The RAID-0 array, which we set up with two of these 160GB units, produced the highest numbers that we have seen at 869 and 599 operations per second in both the Business Winstone and Content Creation Winstone 2005 IPEAK benchmarks, respectively. The RAID-0 array topped even the best performing drive that we have seen yet, Western Digital's 74GB 10,000RPM Raptor. We are itching to see the performance of a RAID-0 array with the new 150GB Raptors! The RAID-0 array also cuts the write service time in half from 8.67ms to 4.67ms.
The raw performance of the drive was shown in the WinBench99 and HDTach RW results. They reported an average read speed of about 60.3MB/sec while the RAID-0 array read at a rate of 84.4MB/sec. The burst read speeds were 247.6MB/sec and 306.5MB/sec respectively. These tests are not always the best indicators of the real performance of a drive, so we went on to put the 160GB 7200.9 through our set of real world tests.
The File System Tasks include File Zip/Unzip/Copy operations. We didn't see much consistency here as the unit was all over the charts in the time that it took to complete the various operations. We did, however, see an improvement in the RAID-0 array over the single drive setup in all of these benchmarks. The RAID-0 array completed the required operations up to 3 seconds quicker in the File Copy tests and almost 10 seconds quicker in the File Zip Tests, and also topped the 74GB Raptor in some cases.
The other real world tests included game level loads from 3 popular games. The game level load tests proved to be insignificant here as the results were inconsistent. However, we saw a great improvement in the Application Load Time benchmarks. With the 160GB drive as the boot drive, applications started up close to 1 second quicker compared to the others in the list. Though this may seem like a small improvement, the numbers were very consistent across all of the drives.
The end result is a platter density with great potential. Imagine running this drive at 10,000RPM and pitting it against Western Digital's powerhouse Raptor. During our benchmarking process with the 160GB 7200.9, we proved that the performance of SATA drives will increase significantly when thrown in a RAID-0 setup. As for the 160GB 7200.9 as a single product, it has shown us that it can keep up with the latest 3.0GB/sec drives such as Hitachi's T7K250 and Western Digital's WD1600JS as far as performance goes.
Pricing at the time that this review is published is fairly competitive with all three of these drives between $80 and $90. The other difference many may want to consider is the extent of warranty given by each manufacturer. Seagate offers a 5-year warranty on all of its internal hard drive products including both desktop and notebook drives, while Western Digital and Hitachi offer 3 years on their desktop products and 5 years only on enterprise class products such as Hitachi's Ultrastar and Western Digital's enterprise class storage drives.
Seagate has mentioned that they will be implementing the perpendicular magnetic recording method into their desktop drives as soon as Q2/Q3 of this year, which means that we may see high density platters in the drives in 2006. However, they can still get away with implementing 160GB platters with current drives using the longitudinal recording method. It should definitely be an interesting year in hard disk drive products for Seagate.
Performance-wise, the 160GB 7200.9 is not a top performer when it comes to game level loading and File Zip and Unzip operations, but it's still far from the bottom of the barrel. Seagate's newest platter design, at 160GB, proves to be a worthy competitor in the long list of hard disk drives that we have benchmarked over the last few years.
We also benchmarked a couple of these drives in a RAID-0 array as a brief look at RAID performance with results that were pleasing to our eyes. The 160GB unit churned out 561 operations per second in our Business Winstone 2004 IPEAK capture benchmark and 378 operations per second in the Content Creation portion of that benchmark. The RAID-0 array, which we set up with two of these 160GB units, produced the highest numbers that we have seen at 869 and 599 operations per second in both the Business Winstone and Content Creation Winstone 2005 IPEAK benchmarks, respectively. The RAID-0 array topped even the best performing drive that we have seen yet, Western Digital's 74GB 10,000RPM Raptor. We are itching to see the performance of a RAID-0 array with the new 150GB Raptors! The RAID-0 array also cuts the write service time in half from 8.67ms to 4.67ms.
The raw performance of the drive was shown in the WinBench99 and HDTach RW results. They reported an average read speed of about 60.3MB/sec while the RAID-0 array read at a rate of 84.4MB/sec. The burst read speeds were 247.6MB/sec and 306.5MB/sec respectively. These tests are not always the best indicators of the real performance of a drive, so we went on to put the 160GB 7200.9 through our set of real world tests.
The File System Tasks include File Zip/Unzip/Copy operations. We didn't see much consistency here as the unit was all over the charts in the time that it took to complete the various operations. We did, however, see an improvement in the RAID-0 array over the single drive setup in all of these benchmarks. The RAID-0 array completed the required operations up to 3 seconds quicker in the File Copy tests and almost 10 seconds quicker in the File Zip Tests, and also topped the 74GB Raptor in some cases.
The other real world tests included game level loads from 3 popular games. The game level load tests proved to be insignificant here as the results were inconsistent. However, we saw a great improvement in the Application Load Time benchmarks. With the 160GB drive as the boot drive, applications started up close to 1 second quicker compared to the others in the list. Though this may seem like a small improvement, the numbers were very consistent across all of the drives.
The end result is a platter density with great potential. Imagine running this drive at 10,000RPM and pitting it against Western Digital's powerhouse Raptor. During our benchmarking process with the 160GB 7200.9, we proved that the performance of SATA drives will increase significantly when thrown in a RAID-0 setup. As for the 160GB 7200.9 as a single product, it has shown us that it can keep up with the latest 3.0GB/sec drives such as Hitachi's T7K250 and Western Digital's WD1600JS as far as performance goes.
Pricing at the time that this review is published is fairly competitive with all three of these drives between $80 and $90. The other difference many may want to consider is the extent of warranty given by each manufacturer. Seagate offers a 5-year warranty on all of its internal hard drive products including both desktop and notebook drives, while Western Digital and Hitachi offer 3 years on their desktop products and 5 years only on enterprise class products such as Hitachi's Ultrastar and Western Digital's enterprise class storage drives.
Seagate has mentioned that they will be implementing the perpendicular magnetic recording method into their desktop drives as soon as Q2/Q3 of this year, which means that we may see high density platters in the drives in 2006. However, they can still get away with implementing 160GB platters with current drives using the longitudinal recording method. It should definitely be an interesting year in hard disk drive products for Seagate.
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PuravSanghani - Wednesday, February 1, 2006 - link
Hey everyone,The thermal and acoustic results are now in the graphs. We pulled the article last week because of the missing data. Enjoy!
Purav
Mr Perfect - Wednesday, February 1, 2006 - link
Well, the thermals arn't anything special, but the accustics are the quietest ones on the cart. :) Might not be important to some, but it's got me interested.Lord Raiden - Friday, January 27, 2006 - link
Thats what I was exactly thinking. A mistake? Or was it deliberately done?In my humble opinion, Seagate has the most respected drivsin the market for so many years so far. I sense some strange shifting of the mood in some reviewers articles around the world favouring the other companies in the reviews. Like Chip, the most selling, most respected magazine has monthly tables with TOP10 drives and seagate scores 9th out of 10 while his scores in particular cateories are comparative with top three every month... i laugh at that table as it is clear evidence of them being not really fair in judgements...
Anandtech is a respectable site and to believe they wasted a whole page talking about temperature where the drive discussed won't appear at all is simply strange.
:-) Maybe they got confused whether to add temperatures of two drives in RAID or make an average out of them... ;-)
Lord Raiden - Friday, January 27, 2006 - link
Ooops,... like CHip, the most selling, most respected magazine in my country...
ATWindsor - Friday, January 27, 2006 - link
Yeah, that was one of the most interesting things to know, I want to now how warm and noisy it is...Ender17 - Friday, January 27, 2006 - link
"We are itching to see the performance of a RAID-0 array with Raptors!"Didn't Anand already write an article on that back in 2004?
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=21...">http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=21...
Western Digital's Raptors in RAID-0: Are two drives better than one?
Scarceas - Saturday, February 4, 2006 - link
They need to compare a single drive not just to a 2 drive raid array, but 3 and 4 drives as well. And then u start getting into controller performance; it can get laborious.Xenoterranos - Friday, January 27, 2006 - link
I think the point is that those tests were done with PATA drives, where a single drive comes close to maxing up the peak theoretical bandidth. With SATA II drives, even two raptors don't come close to the max theoretical bandwidth, so you have a much bigger road to run them on. The point made in that original article still stands: By doing raid-0, you're doubling the chance of data failure and doubling your cost for only a marginal increase. And to most people, loading Quake 10 seconds faster isn't worth 600+ bucks.(now, playing it a 10 fps higher on the other hand...)andrep74 - Wednesday, February 1, 2006 - link
"With SATA II drives, even two raptors don't come close to the max theoretical bandwidth"Especially since they're each on their own controller. Unless you're putting two drives on the same cable, not even PATA drives can come close to saturating the controllers (where I use the term "close" to mean ~90-95%). Most drives cannot even read at 70MB/sec (unless we're talking about solid-state drives). From buffer to controller is another issue entirely, but that rarely has a noticeable impact on overall performance, much less RAID performance.
Live - Friday, January 27, 2006 - link
Well I still believe that the theoretical/syntactical performance is all that really will go up in a Raid-0. Storagereview tester Eugene made this post about Raid-0 in connection to his review of the new 150gb raptor:http://forums.storagereview.net/index.php?s=&s...">http://forums.storagereview.net/index.p...c=21621&...
If Anandtech now takes the position that sata/sata2 somehow changed the disadvantages/advantages of Raid-0 on the desktop I really think they should do more to prove it then just a few lines in a hard drive review. Does Anand agree with the conclusions about Raid stated in this review?