The Test

Our test bed specs have been laid out below. Since our test bed has remained untouched from our look at Seagate's 400GB Barracuda article, we will include our results of the drives that we looked at then.

Our test bed:

AMD Athlon 64 3500+ (2.2Ghz)
Giga-byte GA-K8NXP-SLI
Western Digital WD1600JS
NVIDIA 6600GT SLI Edition (single 128MB card)
1GB (512MBx2) Corsair XMS4400

Our motherboard is an nForce4 based board that features support for the SATA II standard, up to 3Gbps/sec SATA transfer rates, and NCQ and TCQ.

We used the following nForce platform drivers in conjunction with our testbed:

nForce4 Chipset Driver 6.66
Nvidia graphics driver 71.89
Windows XP SP2 w/out further updates

AnandTech Storage Tests
Business Winstone IPEAK a playback test of all of the IO operations that occur within Business Winstone 2004
Content Creation IPEAK a playback test of all of the IO operations that occur within Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004
SYSMark 2004 the official SYSMark 2004 test suite
Business Winstone 2004 the official Business Winstone 2004 test suite
Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004 the official Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004 test suite
Half-Life 2 Level Load Test Half-Life 2 level load time test
Doom 3 Level Load Test Doom 3 level load time test
Command & Conquer: Generals Level Load Test Command & Conquer: Generals level load time test
Real World File System Task Tests timed tests of basic file system tasks including zipping/unzipping and copying files
HDTach Synthetic test for transfer rate of hard disk during a full disk read
Service Time and Transfer Rate Tests Synthetic tests for average service time and transfer rate of hard disk during a full disk read
Business Winstone 2004 Multitasking Test Synthetic tests for overall system multitasking performance
Real World Multitasking Test timed tests of basic multitasking processes, timing a file zip operation while importing Outlook data

More details about each individual test will appear in the section of the review dedicated to that particular test.

The 7200.9 Series

Capacity Platter Density # of Platters/ Heads Spindle speed (RPM) Average Seek Time Average Latency Interface Buffer Sizes
40GB 80GB 1 / 1 7200 8.9ms 4.16ms PATA / SATA 2MB
80GB 160 GB 1 / 1 7200 8.9 ms 4.16ms PATA / SATA 2, 8MB
120GB 120GB 1 / 2 7200 8.5ms 4.16ms PATA / SATA 2, 8MB
160GB 160GB 1 / 2 7200 8.5ms 4.16ms PATA / SATA 2, 8MB
200GB 100GB 2 / 4 7200 8.5ms 4.16ms PATA / SATA 8MB
250GB 125GB 2 / 4 7200 8.5ms 4.16ms PATA / SATA 8MB
300GB 100GB 3 / 6 7200 8.5ms 4.16ms PATA / SATA 16MB
400GB 133GB 3 / 6 7200 8.5ms 4.16ms PATA / SATA 16MB
500GB 125GB 4 / 8 7200 8.5ms 4.16ms PATA / SATA 16MB

The 500GB 7200.9

Click for high resolution version.

The Circuitry

Click for high resolution version.


Index Pure Hard Disk Performance - IPEAK
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  • gutharius - Wednesday, August 30, 2006 - link

    Wanted to ask if during the benchmarking your removed the jumper that sets the Barracuda to SATA150 as opposed to SATA300? Seagate manufactures this drive with the drive set to run SATA150, for compatibility reasons with the VIA chipset. Please check this as I think this drive would fair much better if it were set to run in SATA300 not SATA150.
  • ROcHE - Friday, February 10, 2006 - link

    This is getting confusing with all those platters size. Would be great to have these compaired.
  • kd4yum - Thursday, October 27, 2005 - link

    Hey
    The whole NCQ process has its 'glamour' from SCSI. But really, SCSI just brought it down from Mainframe tech. IF you got 100+ people working a DL/1 or DB2 database, then 'Elevator' queuing pays. Maybe also in a file server (SCSI). But forget it in a Personal Computer! Who you gonna queue?
    Its like trying to do file compression in software during a backup. You lose more in computation than you gain in I/O.
    sorry for the flame
  • eastvillager - Wednesday, October 26, 2005 - link

    You know how your mouth starts to water right before you're about to vomit? :-)
  • Peter - Tuesday, October 25, 2005 - link

    yeah right ... I was so bored with those results I started drooling.
  • formulav8 - Monday, October 24, 2005 - link

    I really do not care for the style of this article/review from this new guy. (I am guessing he is new? Don't reconize the name?)

    I can definitely tell if Anand himself his the author of the article/review or if its one of his fill-in guys. But they do seem to be getting better with time.

    And as many others has said, the title of this article is completely 'false' since the review clearly shows the drive to be average at most. This drive is dissappointing for the features it has. High density platters and 16MB cache and it still gets beat by the older 8MB Cache/Lower Density platter drives. Unless I am looking at the graphs wrong??


    Jason
  • Scrogneugneu - Monday, October 24, 2005 - link

    quote:

    Unless I am looking at the graphs wrong??


    Well, look at the graphs the way you want, the middle will always stay in the middle...
  • tomoyo - Monday, October 24, 2005 - link

    Well first of all, I fully agree that the title "mouthwatering" makes no sense whatsoever. Even the conclusion is so-so at best...if the seagate drive had beaten all the other 7200rpm drives..that would be true mouthwatering numbers. It's not even a winner in terms of storage since there's already 500gb drives out there. Nor does it advance platter sizes like the single platter design. So that title is completely false in my eyes.

    Secondly, I've noticed the writing and analysis has gone greatly downhill since Anand himself hasn't been writing as much. Anand tends to have some insightful commentary on the new technology involved and explainations of the numbers. There's at best shallow explanations of numbers and nothing really distinguishing what's really happening with the benchmarks. And as noted, there's nothing that explains all the different platter sizes in any depth, nor into what pluses or minuses the full SATA 2.5 interface might have in terms of benchmarks and usability. I have to say this is a very disappointing overall job, and I hope the writing and analysis increase by a magnitude of at least 10 to keep up to anandtech standards.
  • Veerappan - Monday, October 24, 2005 - link

    On the final words page is a pic of a read speed test that was performed on this drive.

    http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/storage/seagat...">http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/sto...eagate_b...

    Maybe I am seeing this wrong (or it could be a program limitation), but why is this program reporting that the theoretical limit was 150MB/s? If this drive was being tested at 3.0Gb/s, shouldn't that figure be roughly double what it is?
  • kd4yum - Thursday, October 27, 2005 - link

    Yeah

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