Seagate 7200.11 available

[MrCommunistGen]

The new Seagate 7200.11 drives seem to be available at least in the 1TB form. http://computers.pricegrabber.com/hard-drives/m/48683394/search=7200.11/sort_type=bottomline. Any owners out there who could provide some initial benchmarks?

-mcg

 

[Scotteq]

I have one, no benchies ATM but if I get a chance I'll try to run HDTUNE and see what happens.

From a usability perspective, it's been flawless so far. But quite frankly, I am sure we all expect no less in a HDD nowadays.

Plugged it in, booted up, and it was recognized the first try by the Bios with no drivers needed. Formatting takes a good godd@mned long stinking time, as you would expect from a TB drive. So do that before going to bed. If you want to RAID these, and then format? Umm.. Might be a good time to take the wife and kids on vacation to the islands, or something... :lol:


What I can tell you right now is: It scores a 5.9 (best possible) in Vista 64's Windows Experience Index, all by itself. No tricks, no RAID, just plug it in and go. Not that that means very much from an objective point of view, but my early model 500Gb 7200.10 did 5.4. So the .11 *is* faster by that measure. It is also very noticably quieter than the .10. The clicking/tapping noise of a working HDD is not evident unless I actively listen for it. Of course, in my case that's against the background noise of 4 120mm Scythe case fans. Bottom line is it's faster and *much* quieter than the 7200.10.

Is it faster than the Hitachi Deskstar? I have no idea. It's clearly faster and quieter than the preceding generation of Seagate HDD's tho.

I'll try to get some benchies in the next day or five...

 

[aevm]

For what it's worth: PC Perspective had a review of the WD7500AAKS with benchmarks, and it was even faster than a Raptor. I expect the 1 TB Seagate to be just as good...

 

[Scotteq]

OK - Did a quickie bench using HD Tune. Please note that I did *NOTHING* to prepare for the benchmark. I didn't take anything out of the system tray. I didn't shut down any background programs. I didn't shut off any network connections. No preparation at all. I simply started the comp, checked my eMail and surfed a bit. When the HDD was quiet for a while, I started HD Tune, hit the benchmark button, and went to get something to drink.

I have the normal amount of junk you would expect to see in a HDD as far as programs, music, and whatnot. I think I might have remembered to defrag last week.

System details are posted on the board here - follow the information link. Since it's a measure of the Hard Drive it shouldn't effect the result, but I have the Q66 sitting at an 8 multi over a 400 Mhz baseline FSB (1600Mhz). Ram at DDR2 800 (1:1). North and Southbridge voltages are on AUTO, and the PCI bus is manually set to 100 Mhz. The HDD is plugged into SATA port 0 on a DFI P35 Lanparty Mobo using whatever cable was in the box when I put the comp together. Vista 64, patched to the latest. I have NOT installed any firmware updates, and the HDD is running on the generic windows drivers. HD Tune does NOT run natively on 64 bit Vista, but it does run without making any changes. Meaning I didn't have to specify it to run in compatibility mode.

So, on the negative side: This is a really crap effort, if you can even call it "effort". Because there was no effort, really. On the positive side, its what any schmo can expect to see by mindlessly taking the drive out of the package and plugging it in. Cos that's all I really did.

I didn't bother to learn how HD Tune works, but looking at the graph it appears to send larger and larger bites of some info to and from the drive. My little processor monitoring tool didn't budge, and the amount or RAM in use stayed exactly steady at 1.25GB, which is exactly where the system idles all the time.


What was running on my system at the time:

This is the result:

 

[Scotteq]

I poked around some and found this:

http://www.i4u.com/full-review-318.html

Features & Specifications
Seagate%u2019s Barracuda 7200.11 ST31000340AS 1TB internal HDD has a 7200-RPM spindle speed and can operate with SATA 3.0Gb/s or 1.5Gb/s with NCQ. Seagate promises the average latency to be 4.16ms and the drive uses a 32MB cache. Four platters and eight heads compose the internals of the drive. The Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31000340AS 1TB internal HDD has a mean time before failure of 750,000 hours and requires 2.8 VDC to operate. Shock tolerance while the drive is operating is 63Gs with shock tolerance of 300Gs when the drive is not operating. Acoustics are 2.7 bels at idle and 2.9 bels during seek.

Test Machine
I tested the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31000340AS 1TB internal HDD in a test machine with the following specifications:

* CPU- Intel QX6850
* Mainboard- XFX 680i
* RAM- 2GB OCZ DDR2 6400
* OS- Windows XP Pro

Benchmark%u2019s & Testing
To test the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31000340AS 1TB internal HDD I used HD Tach, Sandra XII, and times the moving of a large file folder to and from the drive with a stopwatch. The first test up for the drive is HD Tach.

HD Tach
HD Tach showed that the random access time for the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31000340AS 1TB internal HDD was 12.7ms and the average read speed was 86.3MB/s. To compare the Hitachi 1TB drive recorded a read speed of 72.6 MB/s and a random access time of 12.8ms. The Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31000340AS 1TB internal HDD was significantly faster in HD Tach%u2019s read speed tests.

Sandra XII
Next up was testing with Sandra XII using the physical discs benchmark. The drive index for the Seagate drive is 75MB/s and the random access time was 13ms. To compare the Hitachi 1TB drive recorded a drive index of 79MB/s and the same 13ms random access time. In Sandra XII, the Hitachi Deskstar 1TB wins.

File Read & Write
The final test was the copy of 435MB of photos in a folder to the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31000340AS 1TB internal HDD and then writing the same folder back to the other system drive in my computer. It took 1-minute and 19-seconds to write the folder to the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31000340AS 1TB internal HDD and it took 28-seconds to read the same folder back to another system drive.

Skipping a bunch of pages of details

Pros

* Fast speeds
* Huge storage capacity
* Faster than a Raptor HDD

Cons

* Expensive

Verdict
After all the tests were done, the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31000340AS 1TB internal HDD ran neck in neck with the Hitachi Deskstar 1TB drive. The Seagate drive ran away from the Hitachi in the HD Tach tests and the Hitachi pulled slightly ahead in Sandra benchmarks. The Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31000340AS 1TB internal HDD is a speedy drive with lots of storage space that is perfect for heavy media users. If you want one of the biggest, baddest hard drives on the planet, the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31000340AS 1TB internal HDD is it.

 

[deusex]

Thinking of getting the 500GB version...will that be just as fast?.....how much faster than 7200.10?

I was considering a 7200.10 500GB barracuda SATA II for my new gaming $2K build....but the 7200.11s..how much better?..raptor speed?

 

[MrCommunistGen]

*NICE* average transfer. Average near what my RAID 0 gets. Seeks a lot faster than my RAID gets.

-mcg

 

[choirbass]

going by the above benchmarks in comparison to current raptors, its largest advantage aside from capacity and platter density (334GB per platter), are its strs, which remain above ~75MB/s for the first ~600GB of the total hdd, compared to a 74GB raptor which is above ~75MB/s for the first ~60GB.

as far as other performance matters, it still trails the raptor for file locating of files throughout the total hdd due to the rpm difference, resulting in increased system responsiveness over the whole hdd even after heavy fragmentation, but thats more of a moot point anyhow considering any of the raptors will fit inside the first 200GB (assuming youre only going to use the first ~200GB as its own partition).

but, as far as practical performance, its 100MB/s and 13ms access times are roughly on par with a raptors 87MB/s and 8ms access times, depending on what youre doing. to be honest though, i was hoping the 334GB platters would set them farther apart, putting the 334GB platters around or above 110MB/s max str (since the platter density is much larger than the 250GB platters of the 750GB WD).

it is a very fast hdd though

 

[Scotteq]

Thinking of getting the 500GB version...will that be just as fast?.....how much faster than 7200.10?

I was considering a 7200.10 500GB barracuda SATA II for my new gaming $2K build....but the 7200.11s..how much better?..raptor speed?

Im on shaky ground here, cos I haven't devoted much attention to HDD tech. So anyone who knows better, please feel free to speak up. If I recall correctly, the 500GB version will have half the platters and half the cache (16MB versus 32MB), but is otherwise identical. So if I understand it correctly, that means it could/should be a bit slower as far as burst performance but will be otherwise roughly comparable. I have no clue how to even begin to quantify that in terms of out/through~put, tho.

To be honest, I also wanted the 500GB version. I simply don't have the data to fill a 1TB drive, and don't anticipate getting anywhere near there in the forseeable future. (DRM being what it is... Bastidz...) But you know how it goes: I saw the big guy on Newegg, and figured "Why Not". :lol: Yah, it wasn't cheap. But it's big, fast, and quiet.

but, as far as practical performance, its 100MB/s and 13ms access times are roughly on par with a raptors 87MB/s and 8ms access times, depending on what youre doing. to be honest though, i was hoping the 334GB platters would set them farther apart, putting the 334GB platters around or above 110MB/s max str (since the platter density is much larger than the 250GB platters of the 750GB WD).

The review I found on the web and posted above showed slightly better numbers than I got: 1ms faster average random access (12 versus 13) and 6GB/S faster average throughput (86 instead of 80). And while using a more sophisticated benchmarking suite on what is surely an empty (OS only) test sample. Given my absolute lack of preparation, I have to say I'm really happy with the result.

So.... It's a bit faster by itself than some (unspecified - presuming older gen 7200 RPM) drives in a Raid config. And it's roughly as fast as a Raptor, except it has 5~10X the capacity and maintains it's speed for 600GB rather than 60Gb. I take this to mean it would take a pair (or more) Raptors in a Raid array to kick the .11 to the curb. Not bad.

Thanks!! Makes me feel good for dropping the change in Newegg's lap.

 

[sadness20]

I wondering how much faster is 7200.11 then 7200.10 in 500gb models? any performance increase? or same?

 

[ausch30]

These are my results with the 500gb ES model of the 7200.10

The 7200.11 has a faster average transfer than my max, nice improvement.

 

[Scotteq]

Ausch - Thanks for the comparison graph.

I wondering how much faster is 7200.11 then 7200.10 in 500gb models? any performance increase? or same?

I haven't seen any of the 500Gb models for sale yet.

 

[deusex]

http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=10005939

http://www.buy.com/retail/product.asp?sku=205076906&SearchEngine=Shopper&SearchTerm=205076906&Type=PE&Category=Comp&Gad=0&dcaid=15889

 

[boliek]

For what it's worth: PC Perspective had a review of the WD7500AAKS with benchmarks, and it was even faster than a Raptor. I expect the 1 TB Seagate to be just as good...

If one were to choose a HD for a reliable and responsive WHS which HD manufacturer would you choose? I have been looking at NewEggs deals below and need to decide which drives to use. I realize that if you buy a 1TB drive right now you pay a premium, but is the premium worth it? I have pre-ordered an HP EX470 WHS which has an installed Seagate 500GB 7200 drive (don't know the model). Of the two drives below, the Seagate has 1 TB, 32MB cache, min/max MB/sec read/write tranfer rates of approx 51/100 and of course a 5 year warranty, but costs $0.30/GB. The WD on the other hand has 750GB, 16MB cache, min/max MB/sec read/write tranfer rates of approx 48/94 (Tom's Hardware), a 3 year warranty and costs $0.24/GB. Between the two which one would you choose?


N82E16822136131 Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD7500AAKS 750GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM - $179.99




N82E16822148274 Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31000340AS 1TB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM - $299.99

 

[choirbass]

well... if you want the fastest continual performance, purchase a large hdd, and only use the fastest portion of it (before the first 70%), keeping the slowest portion of it unused for day to day accessing. that way neither the avg or min STRs from the total capacity even matter really. sure, if you only use the first 70% of a 1TB hdd, thats 300GB sitting unused (possibly even unformatted), but thats also the same 300GB that are only getting ~50MB/s+ for the min avg and max STRs. likewise, if you were to use only the first ~30%, youll get a consistant ~85MB/s+ from beginning to end. this is true for all hdds though, not just the 1TB... but the 1TB has so much capacity, that you probably wont miss the last half of it much at all, if it wasnt there to use really.

so if you were to half stroke the hdd (50% in use only), thats the fastest 50% that the hdd has to offer... also making it so the r/w head only needs to move half to total distance to access any data that might be on there. essentially halving the access times (eg, ~14-16ms 7200rpm full stroke becomes ~7-8ms 7200rpm half stroke). all in all effectively halving the amount of time it would take to do much, for a typical windows user (since the files arent spread throughout the whole capacity as it fills up, reducing the effects of, and need to defragment often, defragmenting also reduces the lifespan of your hdd by introducing additional wear and tear, so its good to limit how often you do if you can).

the same holds true for raptors, which have an effective 8-10ms full stroke, so half stroking one will result in a maximum of 4-5ms to read across any data contained on that partition, the same with quarter stroking (2-3ms), eighth stroking (1-2ms), etc. but raptors are also comparatively small, so most people dont consider that to be as much of an option, if at all. but again, the same relative performance improvements also hold true just the same.

 

[aevm]

If one were to choose a HD for a reliable and responsive WHS which HD manufacturer would you choose?

Seagate and WD are the leading manufacturers and have some of the best products these days. Can't go wrong with either. There's also Samsung SpinPoint, pretty good and usually cheaper, but some people complain about its reliability. Then there's Hitachi, very good but too darn expensive for my taste. For external disks I've had excellent results with WD and LaCie so far.

Google for some reviews, or visit www.anandtech.com and look through their storage articles, they're often very interesting.
http://anandtech.com/storage/

 

[ginbong46]

so uhm sorry for this noob question...

i was thinking of getting a 750GB or 1TB drive and put it in my 4year old system to back-up my IDE 80GB drive.

then put it in my system as the main drive with the OS in the first partition.

is the SATA-II backward compatible with the SATA-I?

thanks

 

[stonewalljackson]

cheaper at newegg. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148288

 

[ausch30]

so uhm sorry for this noob question...

i was thinking of getting a 750GB or 1TB drive and put it in my 4year old system to back-up my IDE 80GB drive.

then put it in my system as the main drive with the OS in the first partition.

is the SATA-II backward compatible with the SATA-I?

thanks

yes

 

[someguy]

A question for those with this drive. I have a Raptor wd1500adfd that I do not use because of the noise. I bought it after reading tons of glowing reviews on newegg, most of which say the drive is quiet. I frankly have no idea how anyone could characterize the penetrating chatter of that drive's access noise as "quiet".

I run a pretty quiet rig: there's a little fan drone, and I can hear my current drive access but it's nothing like the Raptor. Can someone with this drive and some experience of Raptors characterize the relative noise? Because I'm looking for a relatively quiet drive with great performance, and this one sounds like a candidate. Thanks!