until seagate starts releasing ssds, they can keep sata 6g to themselves, burst rates will improve, but thats about it

I can say for a fact that going to a 6 gig drive is a major improvement overall past a 3 gig and you don't have the high cost low capacity of an SSD. I used to QA testing for a company that makes 6 gig HBAs. Sure SSD will be faster but for the cost of 1 SSD you could probably buy 2 or 3 6 gig drives and RAID them so you have way more storage and top speed. Drive speeds are not just in the burst rates but over double the performance you get between 3 gig drives.

until they can release a drive that doesnt run hot i wouldnt go near them.

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Only the 10k and 15k drives run that hot. 7200 should be around the same temperature. Even the 3Gb 15k drives run hot so that wasn't a big surprise from the article

Err I should have said the 7200 RPM drives should be about the same temperature as your 3Gb ones.

My velociraptor at 10k rpm is at ambient

I would rather have hard drive manufactures build more reliable drives rather than continually releasing pre-mature, untested high capacity drives. They should make a product line that has passed the highest of standards of Q&A, identify the product as such, and see if it works from a marketing standpoint. I know there are many like me who would rather have rock solid reliablity than risk loosing valuable data for a drive the was built primarily for speed.

I know what you mean Cletus, but it's almost impossible to do that especially after you are banking alot of money on a product and want it shipped out the door to recoup the cost of R and D. That being said new technology like this has been available to 3rd party manufacturers for months now and they also test their products with these drives and give feedback on it. However the thousands of drives that are used to test this isn't a scratch on the millions of drives that will be sold. So unfortunately out of those millions a few might be inconvenienced on having a bad drive. But then again I've seen $600 top of the line SAS drives go bad so nothing is ever perfect.

http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] 261-7.html
so drives are struggling to saturate the bandwidth of sata 1, let alone sata 2.
atleast sata2 added NCQ.

sata 3 for this drive is just a marketing gimmick.

also the article is misleading at the end, are they saying sata 3 is NOT backwards compatible? are they saying this drive won't work plugged into an sata 2 or 1 port?? I doubt it.

They do, they are called "raid editions" or "enterprise class", or "surveillance"

also, drive reliability is fairly unimportant. I mean, I don't care if the drive has a 10% chance of failing, or a 0.1%, as long as there is a chance, I'm still going to have everything backed up. (within reason of course, I'd still want atleast 3 years warranty). Having said that, I agree that all the gay firmware issues popping up lately are inexcusable.

Wouldn't it be really cool if HDD manufacturers put 2 or 4 ddr3 sodimm slots+battery on the HD, where one could use it for cache or a RAM drive. I guess this is where the 6Gb would really shine :-)

Yes, the link is fast, but how much does it actually benefit one drive? RAID is obviously a different story

If they have ample cache, you could stream 4k HD video content to a cluster of them in RAID 3 or 5.

So now I have to wait for a LGA 1366 motherboard with USB 3.0 *and* 6Gbps SATA so I can eventually build my next WonderComputer with 6+ cores? I'm suffering from information overload and I'll have to go into hiding so I don't wait for the NEXT great option to have...

Seagate, Uh no. Will probably be as dependable as the first generation Xbox 360.
Western Digital any day over Seagate.

By the time Seagate does an even more lengthy QA the competition (WD) would have something out a long time ago. There are times when a good product is good enough.

Please say Seagate has fixed their problem of their drives crashing. As a network administrator, I've never seen a brand fail as often as Seagate.

I couldn't agree more here. We haven't even topped out SATA 1 yet, and are no where near. The newer features SATA 2 brought were nice. Most average hard drives barely knock on the door of 100 mb/sec, let alone typical SSD's are in the 200-250 MB/sec range. Unless someone is running dedicated servers or running 15 SSD drives in RAID 0, what good is the 6000 MB/sec overhead?

6000 Mb/sec, not MB.
Large difference.

I was building a file server at work back when Seagate's 1.5TB Barracudas were going crazy. No other drive was as big at the time though, and due to the issues though the price was unbeatable.

I convinced the higher-ups that we could wait a few weeks and get them anyway. We ordered 9 of them once I confirmed our vendor was shipping the ones with the new firmware.

7 of the drives went into 24/7 service last May and fortunately I haven't had the need yet to try out either of the 2 spares.

Seagate isn't a memory manufacturer. You're more likely to see SSD drives from companies that make RAM. Examples: OCZ, Kingston, Crucial, etc... Seagate will still continue making spinning disks for high capacity purposes.

I returned 4 seagate baracuda 500g hardrives last month...so far my experience with seagate...is really bad.

The whole point of SATA III was for SSDs and RAID not a single mechanical drive. Plus no organization is saying they have a mechanical drive capable of saturating any specific SATA standard, but when you're a a large corp needing huge capacity the SATA III standard will be of huge benefit when raiding these type of drives together.

Let's spell it out then, SATA interface in Megabits per second.
Hard drives stated in megabytes per second.

I stick to the original statement after clarifying, and add that we need to either define and standardize our storage and transfer speeds as bits or bytes. The two terms are entirely too interchanged and can get a consumer easily (even though byte is the more familiar term). In addition to the note about being a business and it helping, that's where SCSI rules, it would have to dethrone that setup first.

ram drive would be abit redundant, but that is basically what the cache is. It would be cool though if it was replacable by the consumer. Im not sure what kind of performance you would get from a 512mb cache on a 7200 drive though. power failures would probably kill your comp without local capacitors/battery powering the drive till the cache was clear and written to disk.

no its not just the high rpm drives that run hot try also the 5400 and 7200rpm drives every seagate drive i have owned plus all my friends who have had seagates have have hot drives. plus several of those have overheated and failed due to overheating. so dont give me that bs where you say only high rpm drive from them run hot. they also make the hottest running notebook drive i know of.

Then explain why in my grandfathers Computer I built, his two 500 gig seagates run at 19C.

I think I am going to wait... There always seems to be buggs with 1st gen stuff of a new tech. I can just see problems, much like when going from SATA1 to SATA2 and the jumper issues, IIRC, confused the hell out of people.

you either got lucky or have a decent cooling system

I find the temperature comments about hi surface temps interesting in light of this showing the Seagate has the lowest temp of any "full time" 7200 rpm drive.

Seagate 7200.12 37.00
Spinpoint F1 38.00
WD Caviar Black 43.00

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts [...] ,1015.html

The reliability comments are also interesting given this:

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/ [...] rive-brand

Each of those 3 drives has there advantages under certain conditions but blanket statements contrary to published data serve no one's best interests. Personally, the 138 64 MB cache, 5 year warranty and customizable firmware make a bigger splash in my mind than the 6 GB/s SATA burst speed

7200rpm drives that get hot are 3 years old, I think u guys are living in the past. I have a stack of them that get burning hot and they all were made in 2005-2006. All the new seagate I get in even the 7200.11 just get warm. Also you can get 5900rpm seagates now if you need it to run even cooler.