Meanwhile I've received a pair of these 500GB Seagate 7200.12 aka ST3500418AS. Both run without surprise on my Ich10r, both have been approved by the full test of Seatools. Nice.
The model has 500GB per platter and rotates at 7200rpm (beware many competitors don't), giving a huge throughput of 134MB/s at contiguous read. Sizes that give this maximum throughput are 250GB (1 head), 500GB (1 platter), 750GB (3 heads) and 1TB (2 platters). The 250GB and 500GB are more silent and start more quickly; I suppose their arm is faster as well, though the specs are identical.
Seagate had issued a ST3500410AS and few weeks later the ST3500418AS. They are nearly identical, and some users even tell their disk with a ST3500418AS tag report as ST3500410AS in the Smart. The ST3500410AS is said to be a "low-halogen" product. There seems to be as well a small speed improvement in the ST3500418AS' arm speed: on Hd Tune's benchmark for access time, you see a cloud of points within a band whose thickness is one platter rotation period. The ST3500410AS had - from curves I found on the Net - quite a bit points over this band, corresponding to some seek attempts that took more time than most ones did, needing one platter rotation more. The ST3500418AS shows nearly none of these out-of-band points, neither on the Net nor in my measurements. According to Seagate's datasheet, the ST3500418AS make a bit more noise.
These disks are very silent. Nothing to do with the 8GB 5400rpm with ball bearings I had before from Seagate - the age of a disk design is more important for noise than the brand. Both the spindle and the arm are more silent than the J8080 = Hds721680plat80 and Hds721616plat80 I still use, which are already totally acceptable and better than the Sp0802n I enjoyed before. Well done!
Access time is 2ms less good than for my J8080 = Hds721680plat80. Atto's performance is better nevertheless, including at small chunks. I didn't find how to set the AAM on this disk. Seatools has no setting for it, HdTune 3.50 shows one and allows the user to play with it, which even lits the Led for disk access, and this setting is memorized and given back by the disk, but it has no effect on speed nor noise. I will try with other means, but did someone ever achieve a difference? If not, I'll consider that the AAM is a functionless feature on the 7200.12.
Expect them to fail eventually: since the introduction of fluid bearings, disk drives have no more wear parts, so if used properly (big if: no shocks, not power failing), they have no better reason to fail than a mobo or a Cpu. Or do they?
I haven't seen how to upload a picture on this forum, but these are Atto's results, equally good on my Ich10r and on my Jmb36x, with the JMicron driver and the Infinst but without any Ahci not Stor driver:
_____Q=1___Q=1__Q=4___Q=4
Size_Write_Read_Write_Read
kB___MB/s__MB/s_MB/s__MB/s
0.5__2.5___7.8__14____16
1____13____27___27____30
2____44____48___49____54
4____74____81___82____90
8____114___126__124___134
16up_129___133__131___134
In the absence of the Infinst, results are slightly less good, except at 0.5kB where they jump to 13..16MB/s.
Such figures at Atto may be the best among any 7200rpm drive, but didn't give me the short boot time I hoped.
) but I've had no troubles to report in about two months of use.
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