500GB Per Platter: Three Next-Gen 7,200 RPM Hard Drives
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Table of contents
- 1 – 500GB Per Platter Available At 7,200 RPM
- 2 – Samsung Spinpoint F3 500GB (HD502HJ)
- 3 – Western Digital Caviar Black 2TB (WD2001FASS)
- 4 – Western Digital RE4 (RAID Edition 4, WD2003FYYS)
- 5 – Comparison Table And Test Setup
- 6 – Transfer Diagrams
- 7 – Throughput, Streaming, And Interface Performance
The hard drive industry’s next major node is the prized 2TB capacity point for 7,200 RPM models. Samsung sent us the first ambassador of such upcoming drives, and WD is already shipping two different 2TB desktop hard drives that deliver optimal performance. We’re still waiting for the Hitachi and Seagate equivalents, but we decided to take these first drives and conduct an initial comparison.
More Speed, More Efficiency
Since most of the industry decided to approach the 2TB capacity point with low-power, high-efficiency hard drives, now is the time for vendors to jump from power savings into raw performance and enjoy minimal competition. All four key players—Hitachi, Samsung, Seagate, and Western Digital—still consider this market to be extremely important, despite increasing competition from flash SSDs.
- Caviar Black 2TB 3.5"...
The reason is simple: hard drive capacities will continue to grow at a significant pace. While this is also the case for flash-based SSDs, the cost for hard drives remains comparatively low. Of course, that means top-of-the-line disk products will continue to be in the $150 to $200 price range, while the latest and greatest SSDs still don’t have a chance of coming close to that.
In addition, high capacity hard drives at decent performance levels are increasingly important for servers and data centers. There’s no alternative to the good ol’ hard drive when it comes to storing huge amounts of data at fast speeds. In the end, the difference between a 110 MB/s "green" drive and a 140 MB/s performance hard drive is still significant. WD’s RE4 drive (RAID Edition), which you’ll find on the following pages, is a perfect example. Hitachi will follow with its A7K2000 and Seagate has its Constellation ES.
More Capacity?
You can expect per-platter capacities to soon leap from 500GB to 640GB or 750GB, allowing the drive makers to create 1.5TB and 2.0TB hard drives with fewer platters and higher capacity points for entry-level models. Today, though, drives larger than 2TB would only make sense in business and enterprise environments, where systems can actually handle such large volumes on bootable partitions larger than 2TB. Intel-based Apple Macs, modern RAID controllers, and fast HBAs are capable of working with GPT (GUID Partition Table) instead of the traditional Master Boot Record (MBR) to achieve this. But most PC platforms available today cannot boot from such a large partition because GPT requires EFI, rather than the conventional BIOS. Sadly enough, while most platforms are stuffed with useful and sometimes useless features, most lack the EFI and GPT support needed to take full advantage of future hard drives larger than 2TB.
So the 2TB capacity barrier will remain with us for a while. We’ll now look at the two new drives by WD and Samsung’s first hard drive to utilize 500GB per platter.
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FIRST!!
finally a chance to talk about the most important matter regarding mechanical storage devices...
There should be a stress test that estimates the real time before drive failure, after all, 2TB is a lot of data to lose... if got bitten before.
I hope to see such test soon.
OK, i'm confused... does this mean velociraptor is no longer the fastest hard drive drive?... i'm sorry but i'm not very good at this... i'm thinking of building a system for gaming... SSD is out of the option so was thinking of getting velociraptor... so can sum1 clears it for me?
2TB is a lot of data to loose, at that level you should do something like raid 1, or 5
Terabyte me! X 2!
Nice performance here! Thanks for coming in today and keep up the good work
No Barracuda 12?
Nice stuff.. Even though the power consumption at idle is a little on the high side for the WD's i doubt the people these are focused on give a crap..
Barracuda .12 is just a revision of the .11 with new firmware for the different cache size i believe.
"Sadly enough, while most platforms are stuffed with useful and sometimes useless features, most lack the EFI and GPT support needed to take full advantage of future hard drives larger than 2TB."
Yea... Though I may prefer to keep my boot drive nice clean and neat while leaving all my stuffs/junks/games on my data drive, it is still sad that our boot drives are/will be still limited at the 2TB.
Maybe in the future (or now for the people w/ big budget)... booting from a 2TB high performance/or RAID HD.
But... anyway... it is still sad that I will be stuck in that 2TB barrier for a while... unless I move to Apple system (which is very unlikely).....
There should be a stress test that estimates the real time before drive failure, after all, 2TB is a lot of data to lose... if got bitten before.I hope to see such test soon.
With so many possible parts that could fail, even if Tom's did that it wouldn't realistically represent what the other million consumers might experience. Also a good drive would probably break in years, by the time you read that review you're already looking at a new generation of hard drives that are released to market (then the cycle starts again).
ugh... sorry... one part of my post was lost... here is the correction...
...Maybe in the future (or now for the people w/ big budget)... booting from a smaller SSD and run everything else on those larger than 2TB high performance/or RAID HD.
sorry about the mistake
TOMS! we need the EDIT function!!!!!
Barracuda .12 is just a revision of the .11 with new firmware for the different cache size i believe.
LOL, the .11 was a 2 platter drive, the .12 is a single platter drive. Their performance is different so cache is probably not the only thing changed.
EDIT: The 7200.12 was the first 500GB per platter drive that Seagate released. The 1TB version uses 2 platters. (Izzycraft obviously took the term 'single platter drive' too literally).
I love the direction that storage technology is going.
SSD are getting cheap enough for my ever increasing impatience for a fast loading OS, and HDDs are getting bigger for my every increasing p0r... er movie collection
@wira020: The Velociraptor (and other 10k or 15k rpm drives) can be beaten in performance by lower speed, higher capacity drives because of their density. A 150GB 3.5" drive vs a 2TB 3.5" drive means that up to 13.3x the data can pass over the heads on the larger capacity drive. A 1.4x rotational speed difference can't make up for that. Not to mention that the Velociraptor drives aren't even 3.5", so you don't get the extra performance from the edge of the platter where it moves past the head at a faster tangential velocity. Obviously this isn't the whole story, or 10k drives wouldn't sell, but my point remains. Horray for physics!
Samsung f3 1 tb drives have been available for a while now. I have 2. And they beet the wd drives and only cost like 80bucks oem on newegg. Wd lost my money this time because you have to buy the RE drives at a price premium if you want raid.
comparison with a few SAS and SSD drives would be nice just to see how "standard" drives compare.
LOL, the .11 was a 2 platter drive, the .12 is a single platter drive. Their performance is different so cache is probably not the only thing changed.
So seagate has
250gb-1TB is the size of the 7200.12
So Seagate wins they already sell 1 tb single platter drives for only 90 bucks
The 250 and the 320gb are single platter but that's it the difference is the cache which is reduced or bigger bah i can't remember.
I'm also surprised. The 7200.12 (from the results of Tom's HDD Benchies) looks like a very nice drive. I bet the 7200.12 feels left out.
Man Im really paranoid of dumping 2tb on a drive and have it fail. I would die if I lost 2tb worth of data. Im a backup freak. Im running a 750gb wd black partitioned out to run 7 and a seagate 7200.12 1tb and I also have a 320gig usb harddrive. I keep backups on all 3 of my drives.
I would rather add more 1tb harddrives then one 2tb drive.
It'll just keep getting bigger and bigger.. I remember when 200MB's on a hardware was huge, then 1GB!!!! WOOOOOOAH! Cmon now people, it's impressive but HIGHLY predictable. It'll be 100TB's before you know it then they will be hitting 1PB. Inevitable. As far as a lot of data to lose? ABSOLUTELY. I hate hard drives for that.
WHO SAY SEAGATE DON'T HANE 2YB , 7200RPM HDD ?!
http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/p [...] rracuda-xt
A massive 2-TB drive capacity .....
The 7200-RPM performance .....
A 64-MB cache optimizes .....
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