OCuKs 7200.10s - Which Firmware?

Netvyper · 30 Sep 2007 at 19:52

Hey Folks,

Im looking to complete my RAID Setup; with the remaining 4x 500gb Disks; I dont need the space at present, but I recently got a disk with the 3.AAK Firmware; It sucks... dropped my sequential read speeds down 10MB/sec.

so Im after 4x 500gb 7200.10s, if they dont have the 3.AAK firmware, I wonder whether anyone knows what firmware the current stock is, or anywhere that will explicitly sell me non AAKs?

The other option would be to use the remaining 4 ports on the card for 1tb disks, and ditch the 7200.10s entirely, but that would be expensive

Slackworth · 1 Oct 2007 at 08:40

It's very hard for us to tell you which firmware you will get when ordering drives as we buy so many that batches can get mixed up. If we go and have a look at one drive it may say one thing but by the time your order is dispatched, it will be a completely different drive maybe with a different firmware.

Netvyper · 2 Oct 2007 at 16:05

Thanks for the response;

would sub-par performance in raid5 constitute a valid RMA reason?

Rroff · 2 Oct 2007 at 18:11

Would say it depends how sub-par really... dropping 10MB/s for a multidisc RAID isn't that big a deal (should be quite a bit less than 10% of the total speed) however if it dropped 30+% then I would have said it would be a valid reason as thats poor drive performance.

Slackworth · 2 Oct 2007 at 20:24

Every single drive is different at the end of the day. You could go through a whole box of 20 and still be no better off.

Netvyper · 3 Oct 2007 at 14:09

Rroff said:
Would say it depends how sub-par really... dropping 10MB/s for a multidisc RAID isn't that big a deal (should be quite a bit less than 10% of the total speed) however if it dropped 30+% then I would have said it would be a valid reason as thats poor drive performance.

The thing is; that not only has it dropped 10MB/s... thats while adding another disk, which should have resulted in a performance increase... so the actual hit taken is probably more in the region of 30MB/s. What im most afraid of, is that if I populate the remainder of the array with these troublesome disks (the AAK firmware), that performance is going to drop even further.

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=17763455&highlight=7200.10+firmware
A post from Zarf there highlights the issue;
I've joined his HDTach graph to mine; and you can see (despite the raid card differences), that 4 7200.10s with AAK firmware are around half as fast a 4 7200.10s without.
http://www.s-lan.co.uk/misc/raidcompare.jpg

Suffice to say; I dont want to significantly degrade the performance of my setup.