My new 2TB drives arrived and are all installed, so how do I feel about them?
Well, first things first - neither were DOA. Reading some other reviews online saw LOTS of people complaining about DOA or degraded units arriving. It seems many people had them delivered poorly. I can see how they would die en-route as OEM drives are bare unboxed drives in static bags only.
Luckily OcUK have packaged mine to survive a military drop from a Hercules at 30,000FT so all is good here! Haribo sweets were included.
The paper specs speak for themselves:
Capacity: 2TB
Cache: 64MB
Interface: SATA 6Gb/s
Spin Speed: 7200RPM
I am running mine from SATA-II Intel ports as my SSD occupies the SATA-III interface. The 1 remaining III port could be used for a single drive but I am running my 2TB units in RAID-0, hence the need for at least 2.
I am happy to report the use of SATA-II has no impact on drive speed. Most review units benchmarked between 170-180MB/Sec Read Writes for a single drive.
How do mine scale in RAID-0? Lets see:
100% scaling on read/write is visible here with ~370MB/sec R/W across the board as file sizes increase.
As expected small operations suffer on the write side but reads pickup to the full throughput almost from the get go. I am very happy with the throughput. This is SATA-II SSD levels of sequential R/W throughput. For drives that are solely to be used for overspill Games storage from the SSD and Data alone these are more than agreeable numbers.
Outside of the benchmark how does an actual file copy operation fare? To test I am copying a large, single file at 11GB in size from the SSD to the HDD. Let's see:
Yup, plenty quick enough and mirrors the benchmark. 11GB moved from SSD to HDD platters in seconds rather than minutes. I performed a move operation on my Left 4 Dead 2 Steam install which is more indicative of a copy operation with 1,000s of files rather than 1 contiguous one.
The copy is ~52,000 Files weighing in at ~13GB. Unfortunately I used a tool to do this which does not report throughput. However, it took less than 2 minutes. Slower than a contiguous file as expected but still blisteringly quick for the best part of 52,000 files.
What about noise? As before with the DOA scare stories some people reported these as being loud. If mine were going to be loud, chucking 2 in RAID-0 would surely be a nightmare?
They are not. They are entirely silent and inaudible above my fans. (My fans are not delta screamers either!). Even when hammering 100s of GBs and 1,000s of files worth of data to them I cannot hear them. The ONLY audible element of the drive is a short sharp click when they first power on and at times rarely after booting in what I assume is the head moving onto the platters from idle states. It's a non-issue basically.
OH NOES Advanced Format 4K drives!
In short - Do not worry about it. Segate has what it calls 'SmartAlign' where the drive internally manages alignment for you.
Why would you care with other drives?
Why should you not care with the Seagate models with this tech?
Cost? Well, we all know prices went up-up-up but I was comfortable paying the price I did from This Week Only on these drives last week.
Overall I am very happy with the drives. Silent, performance that scales in the RAID-0 on P67 Intel SATA controller and no faffing about with drive alignment tools.
Well, first things first - neither were DOA. Reading some other reviews online saw LOTS of people complaining about DOA or degraded units arriving. It seems many people had them delivered poorly. I can see how they would die en-route as OEM drives are bare unboxed drives in static bags only.
Luckily OcUK have packaged mine to survive a military drop from a Hercules at 30,000FT so all is good here! Haribo sweets were included.
The paper specs speak for themselves:
Capacity: 2TB
Cache: 64MB
Interface: SATA 6Gb/s
Spin Speed: 7200RPM
I am running mine from SATA-II Intel ports as my SSD occupies the SATA-III interface. The 1 remaining III port could be used for a single drive but I am running my 2TB units in RAID-0, hence the need for at least 2.
I am happy to report the use of SATA-II has no impact on drive speed. Most review units benchmarked between 170-180MB/Sec Read Writes for a single drive.
How do mine scale in RAID-0? Lets see:
100% scaling on read/write is visible here with ~370MB/sec R/W across the board as file sizes increase.
As expected small operations suffer on the write side but reads pickup to the full throughput almost from the get go. I am very happy with the throughput. This is SATA-II SSD levels of sequential R/W throughput. For drives that are solely to be used for overspill Games storage from the SSD and Data alone these are more than agreeable numbers.
Outside of the benchmark how does an actual file copy operation fare? To test I am copying a large, single file at 11GB in size from the SSD to the HDD. Let's see:
Yup, plenty quick enough and mirrors the benchmark. 11GB moved from SSD to HDD platters in seconds rather than minutes. I performed a move operation on my Left 4 Dead 2 Steam install which is more indicative of a copy operation with 1,000s of files rather than 1 contiguous one.
The copy is ~52,000 Files weighing in at ~13GB. Unfortunately I used a tool to do this which does not report throughput. However, it took less than 2 minutes. Slower than a contiguous file as expected but still blisteringly quick for the best part of 52,000 files.
What about noise? As before with the DOA scare stories some people reported these as being loud. If mine were going to be loud, chucking 2 in RAID-0 would surely be a nightmare?
They are not. They are entirely silent and inaudible above my fans. (My fans are not delta screamers either!). Even when hammering 100s of GBs and 1,000s of files worth of data to them I cannot hear them. The ONLY audible element of the drive is a short sharp click when they first power on and at times rarely after booting in what I assume is the head moving onto the platters from idle states. It's a non-issue basically.
OH NOES Advanced Format 4K drives!
In short - Do not worry about it. Segate has what it calls 'SmartAlign' where the drive internally manages alignment for you.
Why would you care with other drives?
Why should you not care with the Seagate models with this tech?
Cost? Well, we all know prices went up-up-up but I was comfortable paying the price I did from This Week Only on these drives last week.
Overall I am very happy with the drives. Silent, performance that scales in the RAID-0 on P67 Intel SATA controller and no faffing about with drive alignment tools.
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