At a total capacity of 500 GB per hard drive, the industry should seriously consider to split between high capacity and high performance hard drives, because the latest Seagate drive makes a step backwards in performance.
Seagate wants it all these days. Barracuda 7200 desktop hard drives initially did not offer the capacities IBM, Maxtor and Western Digital offered, but they were quick and quiet (except for the very first 7,200 RPM models). The 7200.8 started a race to catch up with the competition by going straight from 200 to 400 GB. Today, the latest 7200.9 generation increases capacities up to half a teraByte. However, its performance is not commensurate with its capacity boost.
The phenomenon we are referring to applies to Hitachi's DeskStar 7K500 top model as well. Both drives offer impressive capacities while maintaining acceptable drive temperature and low acoustics. At the same time, they feature large buffer sizes and the latest interface standards. While the Hitachi delivered roughly the same performance as its predecessor, the Seagate 7200.9's speed is actually slower.
Could this be the point where the industry cannot increase storage performance while boost capacity? We wouldn't say so, because a new technique called perpendicular recording is to be introduced in early 2006, and the hard drive makers expect to further increase both storage density and performance. However, we found that the desktop hard drive market is clearly splitting into three rather than two segments, and that the drive manufacturers have failed to differentiate what they are.
A capacity of 500 GB should even be sufficient for data archiving purposes. Even if you only stored photos at five or six mega pixels (up to 2.5 MB per image) this big Barracuda will be able to host 200,000 of these. You could store over 80,000 high-quality MP3 files (it will take five minutes to save approximately 6 MB at 192 kb/s).
For enterprise environments, larger hard drives help to increase storage density. The more capacity you can fit into a full size 19" rack, the better, because space, energy and maintenance requirements are reduced.
High capacity RAID arrays require fewer hard drives in order to hit common capacity points, or the total storage capacity may be increased by using the same or larger number of drives. Reducing the number of hard drives is attractive for arrays that do not necessarily have to offer the best performance specs. Since fewer hard drives also implicate fewer components that eventually will fail at some point in the (hopefully distant) future, compact RAID arrays are more reliable.
Thus, everyone should not simply opt for the largest hard drive possible. As always, purchasing state-of-the-art products comes at a price premium. We recommend first thinking about the capacity you really need. That should be anything up to 250 GB for most average users, which is what those in the industry call the sweet spot today. Then go and find the hard drive that delivers the best bang for the buck - our regular reviews should be a good help, because we keep including benchmark results of products we already reviewed..

Once again we have a standard 3.5" desktop hard drive with a speed of 7,200 RPM and 16 MB of cache memory with a Serial ATA 2.5 interface with support for hot plugging and Native Command Queuing (NCQ). The latter is an attractive feature for professional environments and users with high performance requirements: The drive will queue incoming commands, reorder them if necessary and execute in an order that requires as little mechanical effort as possible, because moving the heads of a hard drive is what slows them down the most. All you need to support it is a SATA storage controller that is less than a year old.
The four-platter architecture prevents this drive from reaching the same nice temperature ratings that the three-platter Barracuda 7200.8 was able to hit, but it does run a bit cooler than Hitachi's five-platter DeskStar 7K500.


Five Years Warranty And SeaTools
Seagate offers a full five-year warranty, which most other companies don't offer. After investing in a 500 GB hard disk, the warranty is an important issue for customers. Just in case you did not know, this five-year warranty applies to all internal desktop drives that were purchased in retail channels after 1 June 2004. However, gray market hardware and hard drives that came installed in computer systems are excluded.
In order to assist customers who think that their drives are defective, Seagate's SeaTools are available. These can either be executed in an Internet browser or can be downloaded. The SeaTools Desktop is delivered as an image file in order to record a bootable CD-ROM, which you will then have to boot from. According to Seagate, this version is able to detect problems and errors with an accuracy of up to 98%.
Seagate of course primarily deploys this software in order to prevent people from creating a RMA process, possibly causing unnecessary shipping, diagnosis and shipping back because a particular drive actually is in perfect health. To make a long story short, SeaTools was designed to save the company money, but it is also good for the customer. In fact, we hear the same statements from retailers we talk to: More than every third hard drive sent back to the vendor because the user assumes it has a problem actually works perfectly well.

We reviewed Hitachi's top model in August already. In contrast to the Barracuda 7200.8, it comes with five rather than four platters due to a lower storage density. However, the DeskStar still comes out on top compared to Seagate's device.


Speed Or Capacity: Can't We Have Our Cake And Eat It Too?
We already mentioned the performance shortcomings of the Barracuda 7200.9. While the Barracuda 7200.8 scored 13.8 ms and offered a read transfer rate of up to 68 MB/s, the dot nine reaches 14.1 ms and a mere 61 MB/s - which approaches a 10% decrease in transfer rate. The average read transfer rates even went down by 12%.
PCMark05's hard drive benchmark confirms this with a Windows XP startup transfer rates of 7.8 versus 8.2 MB/s. The file writing benchmark even went down to 57.2 MB/s, while the 'Cuda' 7200.8 scored 66.5 MB/s.
With these results, the Barracuda 7200.9 cannot beat Hitachi's latest DeskStar 7K500 top model, which is built by combining as many as five storage platters. While we would generally tend to purchase drives with as little moving components as possible, the 7K500 definitely is the faster choice, beating the 7200.8 in almost every benchmark.
| System Hardware | |
|---|---|
| Processor(s) | 2x Intel Xeon Processor (Nocona core)
3.6 GHz, FSB800, 1 MB L2 Cache |
| Platform | Asus NCL-DS (Socket 604)
Intel E7520 Chipset, BIOS 1005 |
| RAM | Corsair CM72DD512AR-400 (DDR2-400 ECC, reg.)
2x 512 MB, CL3-3-3-10 Timings |
| System Hard Drive | Western Digital Caviar WD1200JB
120 GB, 7,200 rpm, 8 MB Cache, UltraATA/100 |
| Mass Storage Controller(s) | Intel 82801EB UltraATA/100 Controller (ICH5)
Silicon Image Sil3124, PCI-X |
| Networking | Broadcom BCM5721 On-Board Gigabit Ethernet NIC |
| Graphics Card | On-Board Graphics
ATI RageXL, 8 MB |
| System Hardware | |
| Performance-Messungen | c’t h2benchw 3.6 |
| I/O Performance | IOMeter 2003.05.10
Fileserver-Benchmark Webserver-Benchmark Database-Benchmark Workstation-Benchmark |
| System Software & Drivers | |
| OS | Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition, Service Pack 1 |
| Platform Driver | Intel Chipset Installation Utility 7.0.0.1025 |
| Graphics Driver | Default Windows Graphics Driver |
Benchmark Results
Data Transfer Diagram

Interface Performance


Write Transfer Performance


File Write Performance

Drive Surface Temperature





From a customer point of view, Seagate's new Barracuda 7200.9 offers a tremendous amount of storage capacity, backed by a five year warranty that other manufactures only offer for their enterprise class products. If you want a safe bet, this is your drive. However, the Barracuda 7200.9 performed clearly below our expectations, especially since we expect new hard drives to outperform their predecessors.
As it stands now, the Hitachi DeskStar 7K500 remains the fastest 500 GB drive. But then again, the DeskStar7K500 outperformed its predecessor 7K400 by insignificant numbers only. And there will be more hard drives offering larger capacity numbers, albeit minus any performance benefits compared to previous models.
At this point we can't help but to criticize the storage companies. Since hard drives have such a substantial influence on how fast a desktop computer really 'feels' today, increasing performance should not be jeopardized in favor of capacity. Processors are going multi-core, systems will have multiple gigabytes of memory and graphics cards are few generations away from bursting 100 GB/s between GPU and video memory. Do you really want hard drives to remain at 60-70 MB/s? I hope not.
While a drive's reliability still should remain the primary development criteria and we're fully aware that defect numbers have decreased in recent years, there is only one company that already went in the right direction - without actually intending to do so: It was Western Digital who introduced the first 10,000 RPM 3.5" ATA drive when trying to introduce Serial ATA into the entry-level professional segment at an early stage.
Performance and high-capacity drives used to be distinguished by their rotation speed years ago, but we feel the time for distinct product families has come. The hard drive companies should focus on providing both performance and storage optimized products, no matter what rotation speed these run at and no matter what market they go into. If I were to recommend a non-RAID hard drive setup for a high-end desktop computer, it would consist of a Western Digital Raptor and one of these 500 GB monsters - the first as the system drive, the second for storage.
It would be great to see more Raptor-like hard drives from the other manufacturers to address the performance shortcomings. Seagate's Barracuda family has traditionally been a top performer, so why not turn the 7200.10 into a 10k RPM model?
Check out the Tom's Hardware Hard Drive Charts for real-time performance, price/performance and costs per capacity analysis.
Discuss on TG Forumz (Hard Drive Section).
More hard drive articles.