Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 750GB: Size Does Matter
by Gary Key on May 18, 2006 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
IPEAK Business Application Tests
Our IPEAK Winstones benchmarks offer a glimpse into how well our hard disk drives will handle general office applications, media encoding, and graphics manipulation. While the business applications that are being tested tend to be more CPU bound at times, the performance of the hard drive can and will make a difference in the more disk intensive video and graphics applications where large media files are typically being edited.
As expected, the WD Raptor places first as its 10k RPM spindle speed and optimized cache play an important role in its ability to sustain high transfer rates, especially in the Content Creation benchmark where transfer block sizes are significantly larger than in the Business application benchmark.
The Seagate 7200.10 outperforms the 7200.9 by 9% in the Business test and 8% in the Media Content test. These scores are consistent with Seagate's claims that the 7200.10 should outperform the 7200.9 by 10% on average. The WD RE2 500GB drive makes a very strong showing in these benchmarks; obviously it continues the performance trend set by the WD RE2 400GB product. The RAID 0 performance of the Seagate 7200.10 is very good with drive performance increases of 36% in the Business test and 37% in the Content Creation test but still not enough to match the WD Raptor.
IPEAK General Task Tests
The IPEAK based General Task benchmarks are designed to replicate utility based application tasks that typically are disk intensive and represent common programs utilized on the majority of personal computers. While the WinRAR program is very CPU intensive it will typically stress the storage system in short bursts. Our antivirus benchmark will stress the storage system with continual reads and sporadic write requests while the defragmentation process is split between continual read and write requests.
The Seagate 7200.10 RAID 0 combination scores first in three of the four tests with the WD Raptor close behind while the Raptor takes three of four tests in the single drive category. The Barracuda 7200.10 finally surpasses the WD RE2 and posts excellent scores in the very drive intensive antivirus and disk defragmentation benchmarks but falls up to 26% behind in the file decompression test. The Seagate 7200.10 outperforms the 7200.9 by 8% in the WinRAR tests, 8% in the defragmentation test, and 15% in the AVG antivirus benchmark that continues a steady pattern of improved performance for this series.
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Gary Key - Thursday, May 18, 2006 - link
The charts have been changed. :)
VooDooAddict - Thursday, May 18, 2006 - link
I like the "db(A)@5mm" sugestion.FallenDeathAngel - Thursday, May 18, 2006 - link
The RaptorWD1500ADFD Western Digital
Raptor
WD5000YS
Yes....
SpaceRanger - Thursday, May 18, 2006 - link
That the only drive you tested in RAID-0, was the new Seagate drive. The performace charts are kinda useless when the RAID-0 scores are included, cause it misleadingly shows the Seagate drive on top of a good portion of them. Without examples of RAID-0 performance from the WD1500 Raptor, or the WD5000YS, you are giving the impression of favoritism towards the Seagate drive.Gary Key - Thursday, May 18, 2006 - link
Good Day....from page 5-
We are providing RAID 0 results for the Seagate 7200.10 for comparative results to the single drive. Seagate has recently released updated firmware for the 500GB 7200.9 that improves RAID performance; unfortunately we were unable to complete our testing with the new firmware before publication. Our RAID results for the WD1500 series will be published in our next storage article.
We will have RAID O results for both of these drives in the 500GB roundup. We are not tyring to show favoritism towards the Seagate drive. Our comments are quite clear about the effects of RAID 0 in the I/O operations that while interesting, they do not always translate to actual 1:1 improvements in application usage. Our application timing tests bear this out to some degree.
We debated on showing the Seagate RAID 0 results as it is a no win situation. I am sure based upon the comments from our last couple of reviews that about as many people would be asking why we did not provide RAID 0 results. We are currently completing the RAID 0 results with the WD1500 drives, we ran into a couple of issues that required technical conversations with WD. Also, the sheer scope of testing every drive in RAID configurations is extremely time consuming with results that are basically the same when compared to the single drive scores.
My personal opinion is that RAID 0 is only effective in such a limited scope of applications that we should not report it at all. However, this feature has been pushed by the core logic chipset suppliers, marketed by the motherboard suppliers, and eventually becomes a test request by the user community. I would much rather show the benefits of RAID 5, 0+1, 10 in a separate article, which we will in the future. It is difficult at times to procure three samples of each drive. ;-)
I appreciate your comments, they will probably not be the last on this subject.
srk052004 - Thursday, May 25, 2006 - link
Hi Gary (and all). I have been told that for my purposes (manipulating 40gb SAS or SPSS data sets), RAID 0 really would be appropriate. Do you agree? Or, would you say that RAID 10 would still be preferable?I, too, would LOVE to see results comparing different capacities of 7200.10.
BTW, this was an interesting review.
SpaceRanger - Thursday, May 18, 2006 - link
Thank you for the quick response :)If you wants to show the comparision between RAID-0 and the Single drive, then have seperate charts showing just those 2. It makes the analysis of the performance much easier.
Now THAT'S an article I'd love to read as well!
Zoomer - Friday, May 26, 2006 - link
Ditto. It would be a nice way to split up articles into _more_ managable chunks of work!Thanks for the review! Will be looking forward to the ibm (hitachi), seagate and WD shootout.
Gary Key - Saturday, June 24, 2006 - link
We will change our format in July with the 500GB and 250~320GB roundups. I too would like to manage the chunks of work in different fashion.Questar - Thursday, May 18, 2006 - link
Then what was different than what Seagate claimed?