Seagate 600 SSD 240 GB Review: LAMD And Toshiba, Together Again

Features
By Christopher Ryan
published

Seagate is the world's largest purveyor of mechanical hard drives. As the company prepares for mortal combat in the consumer SSD space, are its wits, Toshiba's Toggle-mode NAND, and SK hynix memory solutions' 87800 controller enough to get by?

Results: PCMark 7 And PCMark Vantage

Futuremark's PCMark 7: Secondary Storage Suite

PCMark 7 uses the same trace-based technology as our Storage Bench v1.0 for its storage suite testing. It employs a geometric mean scoring system to generate a composite, so we end up with PCMarks instead of a megabytes per second. One-thousand points separate the top and bottom, but that encompasses a far larger difference than the score alone indicates.

PCMark 7 is a vast improvement over the older PCMark Vantage, at least for SSD benchmarking. The storage suite is comprised of several small traces. At the end, the geometric mean of those scores is scaled with a number representing the test system's speed. The scores generated are much different from PCMark Vantage, and many manufacturers are predisposed to dislike it for that reason. It's hard to figure out how PCMark 7 "works" because it uses a sliding scale to generate scores. Still, it represents one of the best canned benchmarks for storage, and if nothing else, it helps reinforce the idea that the differences in modern SSD performance don't necessarily amount to a better user experience in average consumer workloads.

Seagate's effort doesn't show as well, but anything above a score of 5,200 is ridiculously fast anyway. The 600's 5,290 puts it very close to Corsair at 5,345. How close? The 600 SSD trails by an insignificant 1%. How's that for parity? And, even more telling, the old-school SSD 510 is another 1% down from Seagate's 600. Flexing big IOPS numbers doesn't hand over the top spot in more desktop-oriented workloads, just as weak I/O performance doesn't kick you down to the recycling bin of history. Intel's SSD 510 is still proper-quick, and so is Seagate's 600. One shows better in measures of random I/O performance, but that simply doesn't translate to significant differences in these trace-based tools.

The Plextor M5 Pro actually takes top billing away from OCZ's Vector, but the margin of victory is so, so narrow.

Futuremark's PCMark Vantage: Hard Drive Suite

PCMark's Vantage isn't the paragon of SSD testing, mainly just because it's old and wasn't designed for the massive performance solid-state technology enables. Intended to exploit the new features in Windows Vista, Vantage was certainly at the forefront of consumer storage benching at the time. Vantage works by taking the geometric mean of composite storage scores and then scaling them a lot like PCMark 7 does. But in Vantage's case, this scaling is achieved by arbitrarily multiplying the geometric sub-score mean by 214.65. That scaling factor is supposed to represent an average test system of the day (a system that's now close to a decade behind the times). PCMark 7 improves on this by creating a unique system-dependent scaling factor and newer trace technology. Why bother including this metric, then? A lot of folks prefer Vantage in spite of or because of the cartoonish scores and widespread adoption.

Corsair's Neutron reclaims the top rung from Plextor's drive, though the differences are quite small and very few PCMarks separate the best of the best. The Seagate 600 lands ever so slightly ahead of the Vector to wrench third place away from OCZ.

Christopher Ryan
21 Comments Comment from the forums
  • mayankleoboy1
    1. Where is the Samsung 840 and 840 Pro ? Samsung 830 is quite old now.
    2. I dont get why you use QD greater than 4 in the synthetics. All of thses drives are for PC users, who will rarely get QD even equal to 4.

    3.I would have liked more real world tests like : Copying to and from drive, restoring backups, decompressing large ISO files , doing all of the above and then noting the time it takes to open Photoshop,

    4. Can you do a pre and post defragment test, just for lolz ?
    5. Can you do a test where the windows system is paging on the SSD ? basically a measure of the read/write disc speed when the OS is low on RAM and is using the SSD for pagefile.
    6. IMHO, if you use completely incompressible data to check the perf of SSD, you are deliberately biasing against the Sandforce based SSD's. Could you use a better mix of compressible and incompressible data ? The dynamic compression will definitely improve the perf of Sandforce SSD's in real world desktop usage.
    Reply
  • mayankleoboy1
    And two more :

    1. The time it takes to do a full drive complete error checking (check file errors+recovery of bad sectors).
    2. The time it takes for a deleted file to be recovered ,using a third party data recovery freeware.
    Reply
  • kyuuketsuki
    Not a bad drive at all. However, that warranty nonsense Seagate is trying to pull is enough to make this a definite pass. Not going to support that.
    Reply
  • ryomitomo
    There's a typo in the chart in the first page. The Max Warranty TBW for 120GB version should read 36.5TB instead of 36.5GB. Otherwise, it is not much of a lifetime write endurance.
    Reply
  • Twoboxer
    I have no problem with their warranty statement. They are telling you exactly how long its going to last. As long as the device reports where it is along the way, I'll know exactly when to replace it - no surprises.
    Reply
  • Soda-88
    I don't see the problem with dual condition warranty. They're just protecting themselves from people who would abuse their SSD with heavy video capturing or something of the sort.
    Reply
  • velosteraptor
    Soda-88I don't see the problem with dual condition warranty. They're just protecting themselves from people who would abuse their SSD with heavy video capturing or something of the sort.
    I dont have a problem with the dual condition warranty either, its a lot like a car; (10 year, 100,000 miles) I think the problem is that they are only giving a 3 year warranty, where almost everyone else in the ssd market has 5 year warrantys, and unconditioned at that. Even if the drive is faster than some of the other models tested here, id feel much safer buying a drive with a longer warranty, knowing its going to be protected for an extra 2 years.
    Reply
  • raidtarded
    Almost every SSD manufacturer ties warranties to the amount of writes to the drive, you just have to read the fine print in the warranty. At least Seagate is upfront, most are hiding it until RMA time.
    Reply
  • will1220
    raidtardedAlmost every SSD manufacturer ties warranties to the amount of writes to the drive, you just have to read the fine print in the warranty. At least Seagate is upfront, most are hiding it until RMA time.
    False. Neither Ocz or samsung have limits on how much data is written on the drive. And their the only two ssd brands worth buying.
    Reply
  • mapesdhs
    Please stop using graphs that have non-zero origins! They are incredibly visually misleading.
    Such charts are the domain of dodgy advertisers, not tech sites that seek to convey useful
    information, etc.

    Ian.
    Reply