Seagate Baracuda 7200.12 500GB/Platter SHIPPING NOW!!!!

clocka

clocka

clocka

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I do wonder how it will perform, the 250GB single platter 7200.10(but really a 7200.11) was well pretty much soundly beaten by other versions with more than one platter. I guess because access times aren't halfed but effectively reduced by reading off both platters.

Maybe in HDtach it will be pretty good, theres been some benchies already, supposedly, though they didn't really look any different from a smaller platter Seagate. But in real world benchmarks, game loading, server workload simulation, multitasking single platter drives tend to fall quite a ways behind.

Building a new computer up in the next few days with a P2 940 and wondering what to go for, probably 2x640gb spinpoints in raid 0, the other option is 2 of these or a couple seagate drives.

needs more 160GB SSD's at, maybe £100 or so. When that happens 1 or 2 of them in raid for windows/games/applications will rock.
 
not sure what you are on about with multi platter drives being faster, that isnt true, they are the same speed or very slightly slower due to the read head moving between the platters. A large single platter is what you want, the samsung f1 320gb is a great drive, the seagate 7200.11 are also fast with 375gb platters, they give similar performance to the samsung f1. the leap from 333gb to 375gb isnt very big but the leap form 375gb to 500gb is very big, hopefully the seek times will be good on these drives as they were only ok on the 7200.11 drives with around 12.7ms or so seek.
 
Nice. They say 160MB/s sustained data rate - they usually give pretty accurate readings/estimates.

The sustained data rate stats on the 1.5TB drives are actually lower on the Seagate site compared to their performance in real life, so hopefully the same goes for the new 7200.12 drives.
 
the review must surely be using a crap controller or something as there are massive spikes at the beginning of the test, unlikely that will happen on all drives, with that removed the average speed will go up a lot, shame the seek is low, but again that could be due to bad controller, will have to wait for reviews i think.

Think seagate said 120mb/s for 7200.11 but they were 105mb/s in reality, so these drives will likely get 140mb/s in reality which would be great, faster than a velociraptor for transfer speed, obviously not seek time LOL.
 
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iv said it before in the other thread but something is not right with these drives, the benchmark of hdtune looks like the drive uses a 375gb platter, 500gb platter should have much higher transfer rate if its still spinning at 7200rpm.

and seeing as how its seagate i wont be the beta tester of these drives to see if they still have reliability issues the hard way.
 
Craig321 said:
Nice. They say 160MB/s sustained data rate - they usually give pretty accurate readings/estimates.

The sustained data rate stats on the 1.5TB drives are actually lower on the Seagate site compared to their performance in real life, so hopefully the same goes for the new 7200.12 drives.
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yep 160mb/s sounds right for 500gb platter compared to the 125mb/s for the 375gb platter. but the hdtune bench posted above doesnt make sense if thats really done on a single platter 500gb drive.

if its true then this drive could be the first one to bust the 133mb/s ide limit and will be the first to max out the sata generation 1 speed limit. now the reliability...........
 
Hopefully the issues with the 7200.11 drives will be ironed out with these. Looking forward to WD and Seagate 2TB drives this year.
 
clocka said:
not sure what you are on about with multi platter drives being faster, that isnt true, they are the same speed or very slightly slower due to the read head moving between the platters. A large single platter is what you want, the samsung f1 320gb is a great drive, the seagate 7200.11 are also fast with 375gb platters, they give similar performance to the samsung f1. the leap from 333gb to 375gb isnt very big but the leap form 375gb to 500gb is very big, hopefully the seek times will be good on these drives as they were only ok on the 7200.11 drives with around 12.7ms or so seek.
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you don't move read heads between platters, you have one head for each platter. As the data is spread across both platters you'll find that in the best case scenario which would be incredibly rare, as you access lots of small files you're almost halving the access time, in reality its very rarely that effective but you do get an improvement. I've never ever not seen a multi platter version of the same drive not improve performance even if its just a little.

Bitech did a review I think it was on the 1.5tb drive recently and it included the single platter 7200.10 which was really a 7200.11 released in the same way as this drive, you can see how badly it lags in certain situations compared to the multi platter versions in the range, somtimes massive lagging thats down to FAR more than the extra cache.

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2009/01/01/seagate-1-5tb-barracuda-7200-11-review/6

Almost every situation based on loading lots of small files the single platter drive drops horribly behind, while multiplatter drives always offer more performance, theres several situations where the single platter comes close, but often it drops by massive amounts. Its simply not a good idea to go single platter at all.

at the end of the day transfer speeds are nice but the faster access time on the spinpoint 1tb/640gb drives, coupled with very high sustained transfer if not quite the top gives you better overall performance for things like app loading, game loading, booting and creating lots of small files. While a flat out best sustained transfer might be best for copying large single files and a couple other instances mostly ever so slightly lower transfer speeds + better access time will win.

i've currently got 2 x7200.10 250gb single platters in raid and the performance is severly lacking in certain situations compared to my older small platter 500gb 7200.10's in had in raid on the previous computer.

The main reason it works better, and isn't due to the cache is, the drive can't fill the cache while its accessing a platter and the cache can be transfered quicker than it can be filled. With more platters you can essentially fill the cache from one platter while the other one access's. I mean, in those tests the single platter drive is over 50% slower to do tasks in several benchmarks. THe only upside of single platter drives is quieter and cooler, thats it. They are less good value, because the same casing and same time taken to build basically for a single platter as a multi platter drive, more platters in one drive gives better value, better performance also.
 
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Hopefully these single platter 500GB drives do get ~160MB/s, then I'll be raiding a few - hopefully that will break the 300MB/s barrier :)
 
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drunkenmaster said:
you have one head for each platter
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that depends on the drive configuration, since platters are usually double sided you end up with 2 heads per platter.

and from the rest of what you were saying are you saying that the data on a hard drive is Raided across the platters it has and the more platters it has the faster it is? because somone else said that before on this forum and got blasted for it since its completley wrong.

as for that bittech review you posted are you aware that the 1.5tb drive uses 375gb platters where as the 250gb drive uses probably a 250gb platter and the 1tb drive probably uses 3 of those 334gb platters or 4 x 250gb platters. thats where the performance differences are being shown. not in the number of platters but the platter density.

this is why you think the single platter drives are slower, since your looking at a single platter drive that has a lower platter density to begin with. your not comparing like for like. the link u posted has shown in hdtach that the average speeds are not the same http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2009/01/01/seagate-1-5tb-barracuda-7200-11-review/3 so the variables that attain that are the spin speed or platter density. NOT the number of platters.
you need to read up a LOT more on this since your comming across as just being plain drunk.
 
Cyber-Mav said:
that depends on the drive configuration, since platters are usually double sided you end up with 2 heads per platter.

and from the rest of what you were saying are you saying that the data on a hard drive is Raided across the platters it has and the more platters it has the faster it is? because somone else said that before on this forum and got blasted for it since its completley wrong.

as for that bittech review you posted are you aware that the 1.5tb drive uses 375gb platters where as the 250gb drive uses probably a 250gb platter and the 1tb drive probably uses 3 of those 334gb platters or 4 x 250gb platters. thats where the performance differences are being shown. not in the number of platters but the platter density.

this is why you think the single platter drives are slower, since your looking at a single platter drive that has a lower platter density to begin with. your not comparing like for like. the link u posted has shown in hdtach that the average speeds are not the same http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2009/01/01/seagate-1-5tb-barracuda-7200-11-review/3 so the variables that attain that are the spin speed or platter density. NOT the number of platters.
you need to read up a LOT more on this since your comming across as just being plain drunk.
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the 1tb drive is 4x 250gb, and the 250gb is a single 250gb platter. only the newer 1.5tb had the much bigger platter, and the 1tb thoroughly spanked the 250gb single platter drive with not much advantage except more platters. yes there is a slight cache difference but for instance, the 750gb seagates, which you can get in both 16 and 32mb cache show far less performance difference than the ones here, again the biggest difference here is the number of platters.

The 1,5tb drive is faster where it should be slightly faster sequential stuff and the 1tb drive might have more cache than the single platter 250gb, but it has a supposedly known problem with certain things where it fails down which is fixed on the 1.5tb(according to the article) so its not like its extra cache was working perfectly.
 
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your sure that 7200.10 250gb drive is a single platter?

im sitting on 2 x 500gb 7200.10 , a 750gb 7200.10 and a 250gb 7200.10 drive here and they arent using 250gb platters they use 188gb platters, the 250gb 7200.10 i have uses 2 platters.

not sure what they used in that review, but seagates own documentation here http://www.seagate.com/docs/pdf/datasheet/disc/ds_barracuda_7200_10.pdf shows that the 250gb was available in either 2 or 1 platter configurations. guess im unlucky with the older drives.

as for cache, it may have been what made the difference if NCQ was enabled in the tests.
 
nope, seagate, same with the drive in question, just tend to test out their new platters with one model listed under the previous range. As in, weeks before the whole 7200.11 line launched their launched the single platter 7200.10 250GB with a single platter, its basically a 7200.11 in all but the lable. Which again begs the question, why's it over 50% slower in 1/2 tests. I bought into the idea, got two in raid and they feel horrible sometimes, ridiculously slow in some specific area's while decent in others.

I just can't decide if i buy today, 2x 640 spinpoints, 2x640 hitachi's, 2x 500gb platter seagates if I can find them, or hold on to these for a few more weeks and wait for benchmarks. Problem is likelyhood of seeing a comparison of those 3 setups is almost non exisistant, bit of a shame :(

WHy the hell do Hitachi, Samsung and probably the others not list in the specs how many platters they have?


http://www.hitachigst.com/tech/tech...985D/$file/DS_CS_7K1000.B_OEM_Spec_rev1.1.pdf

Bingo ;)

check out 2.0 and 4.5.2, essentially its getting at 1 disk = 14ms seek time average, 2 or 3 disks and your average seek time is.............. 8.5ms. disks in this case being platters not physical disks. In other words, single platter designs = a HUGE NO if you want performance. Probably the best/cheapest way to get performance it find the max platter density, buy a drive double that size, which is 640gb at the moment on most models.

Gonna have a look but assume i'll find a similar thing in pdf's from all manu's. My choice is down to 2x 640 hitachi's or Samsungs, storage review puts the new hitachi's mostly ahead in 1tb vs 1tb, about the only numbers I can find.

EDIT:- another edit, the 750gb hitachi new drives have 2 platters in, so 375gb platters at least? maybe those are gonna be the fastest then, hmmm.


EDIT:_ again http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.j...c5fb010VgnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD&reqPage=Model

and

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.j...c5fb010VgnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD&reqPage=Model

thats a faster 7200.11 platter in that single 250gb design, >11ms seek time, the smaller platter older tech but dual platter 320gb drive has a seek time of 8.5ms. Thats where the performance massively differ's. not fair off a 50% slower seek is the reason it sucks. All the manufactures have FAR faster seek time on multiplatter drives.

DO NOT buy a single platter drive, especially trying to get performance. They suck for value and performance, 2 older/smaller platters give better performance and are still better value.
 
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