The World's First 3TB HDD: Seagate GoFlex Desk 3TB Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 23, 2010 12:39 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
- Seagate
- HDDs
- GoFlex Desk
3TB Internal Drive Performance - Nothing to Get Excited About Yet
To hit 3TB Seagate had to increase the areal density of the Barracuda XT’s platters. If the 3TB drive uses 5 platters that’s 600GB per platter, up from 500GB in the 2TB version. Note that the internal Barracuda XT will most likely have a 64MB DRAM cache and other tweaks to make it more of a performer. This comparison is only useful for those folks trying to get an early jump on the internal 3TB bandwagon:
| SATA Performance Comparison | |||||
| Seagate Barracuda XT 2TB | Seagate GoFlex Desk Barracuda XT 3TB (SATA) | Seagate GoFlex Desk Barracuda XT 3TB (USB 3.0) | |||
| Sequential Read | 131.8 MB/s | 121.4 MB/s | 151.9 MB/s | ||
| Sequential Write | 132.9 MB/s | 119.8 MB/s | 151.2 MB/s | ||
| Random Read | 0.29 MB/s | 0.43 MB/s | 0.30 MB/s | ||
| Random Write | 1.3 MB/s | 0.98 MB/s | 0.93 MB/s | ||
You’ll note that random performance isn’t really much better and sequential performance is actually down from the 2TB drive due in part to the fact that we've got a smaller cache and generally less performance optimized drive with this external 3TB unit compared to the 2TB internal drive. Over USB 3.0 we actually get much better sequential performance apparently due to some additional buffering done by the USB 3 controller.
The bottom line: when internal versions of the 3TB drives ship, don’t expect them to perform much differently from the 2TB drives we have today.
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zdzichu - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
In first performance table you switched results for SATA and USB3.0 of 3TB drive.oc3an - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
The maximum integer which can be represented with 32 bits is 4294967295 i.e. 2^32 - 1 which allows for 4294967296 values. The article is worded incorrectly.mino - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
"...so the largest partition you can have in a MBR partitioned drive is 4294967296 * 512-bytes or 2,199,023,255,552 bytes..."Are you sure that is an incorrect wording?
mino - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
BIOS does support booting from GPT.It is the Windows boot loader that cannot boot from GPT on BIOS systems.
As a matter of fact I am writing this from Gigabyte 780G board running Ubuntu 10.04 on top of GPT(on top of LVM on top of MD on top of GPT).
yuhong - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
To be more precise, all that BIOS does is read the first sector of the drive, check for the signature at the end, and if it matches, then it jumps to the real mode x86 code at the beginning. It is actually partition scheme agnostic. Now some BIOSes are not quite partition scheme agnostic and will rely on the contents of the first sector being in the MBR format, luckily GPT support a protective MBR.baker269 - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
I would love to see what the Ethernet speeds are like. Not that great I would guess since it's not a true NAS, but still would be nice.mindless1 - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
?? It doesn't have an ethernet interface does it? Speeds would be similar enough to any current-gen 7200 RPM drive already in a system on your LAN.baker269 - Tuesday, August 24, 2010 - link
From the forth paragraph of the article."The drives themselves are standard 3.5” hard drives in a plastic enclosure designed to mate with GoFlex Desk adapters that add USB 2.0, USB 3.0, FireWire 800 or Ethernet connectivity to the drive."
It"s not as easy as just plugging in a hard drive with a RJ45 to a router, there needs to be some kind of CPU in between the two. NAS performance through Ethernet varies greatly.
derkurt - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
Is it such a big deal that Windows doesn't boot from GPT drives if the BIOS is not EFI-capable? Whoever spends 400+ USD on a drive probably just needs lots of storage space for plain data. It's unlikely that there is no fast boot drive present in any system this drive is plugged into. Actually, since the first expansive 3 TB drives are bought by enthusiasts, chances are that the customers are already using an SSD as a boot drive.That said, in a realistic setting for a performance workstation with Windows 7 x64 installed on a 80+ GB SSD, there won't be a problem. You can connect the drive to the internal SATA connector, partition it with GPT and start using it, while your BIOS doesn't need to know anything about EFI or GPT. The heat issues might also look better when using the drive internally.
I don't understand why Seagate is holding back with selling the internal model. An estimated 95% of users will never even try to boot from it, and for the rest (who do want to boot from it but don't know about the 2+ TB issues), there could be a red warning note inside the box explaining the juicy details. After all, those who spend such an amount of money on a hard drive are not exactly the kind of people who have no clue about hard drives at all.
dryloch - Monday, August 23, 2010 - link
One of Seagates biggest advantages has been that their external hard drives come with a 5 year warranty. Why would they go to a two year warranty on the most expensive drive they sell? If anything they should have at least gone with three years. If they don't even trust this drive then I sure won't. I'll be waiting for Western Digital to have their drive out.