Seagate Barracuda 7200.8: 400GBs with NCQ
by Purav Sanghani on April 20, 2005 4:30 PM EST- Posted in
- Storage
The RPM Factor
RPM, or revolutions per minute, is the measure of instances that the motor of the hard drive can rotate the platters by a full 360 degrees. Currently, there are various drives from a few different manufacturers that can rotate their platters 10,000 to 15,000 times per minute, or 15,000RPM. The most common drives today are rated at 7200RPM like our 400GB 7200.8 Seagate Barracuda, and there are still many 5400RPM drives around also.So, does the speed of a drive's motor really make a difference in the performance of a drive? If we look at just the speed of the motor, then yes, there is a great performance boost from a 7200RPM drive to a 10,000 or 15,000RPM drive. The faster that the motor can rotate the platters, the quicker that the read and write heads can do their job on the platters. But there are other factors that come into play when measuring the performance of a hard disk drive. SATA based drives have a maximum data transfer rate of 150MBs/sec (megabytes per second) while IDE drives top out at 133MBs/sec. The transfer rate can be enough to even things out under certain circumstances. The same goes for the amount of cache on the drive. A 7200RPM drive with 16MB of cache has been proven to compete with a 10,000RPM drive with 8MB of cache, again, in certain situations.
We have taken two of the latest drives from Maxtor that we could get our hands on to compare the differences in performance between the DiamondMax 16 series 160GB drive with a 5400RPM motor, and the DiamondMax Plus 9 series 160GB unit with a 7200RPM motor. Both drives are of the PATA/133 flavor, have 8MB buffers on board, and have a total of two 80GB platters each. With the physical specifications being identical in every aspect, let's take a look at how the two units compare in performance based on their spindle speed.
5400RPM vs 7200RPM Spindle Speed |
|||
DiamondMax Plus 9 (7200RPM) |
DiamondMax
16 (5400RPM) |
7200RPM Performance Advantage |
|
SYSMark 2004 - Internet Content Creation Performance |
|||
| Overall | 195 |
191 |
2.09% |
| 3D Content Creation | 174 |
172 |
1.16% |
| 2D Content Creation | 251 |
244 |
2.87% |
| Web Publication | 170 |
167 |
1.8% |
SYSMark 2004 - Office Productivity - Communication Performance |
|||
| Overall | 153 |
144 |
6.25% |
| Communication | 144 |
122 |
18.03% |
SYSMark 2004 - Overall System Performance |
|||
| Overall Performance | 173 |
166 |
4.22% |
| Internet Content Creation | 195 |
191 |
2.09% |
| Office Productivity | 153 |
144 |
6.25% |
Winstone 2004 - Overall System Performance |
|||
| Business | 25.5 |
25 |
2% |
| Multimedia Content Creation | 31.5 |
31.5 |
0 |
Pure Hard Disk Performance - IPEAK, Winstone 2004 |
|||
| Business | 442 |
383 |
15.4% |
| Multimedia Content Creation | 267 |
238 |
12.18% |
Real World Performance - File System Tasks (seconds) |
|||
| File Zip (1 300MB File) | 61.331 |
74.224 |
21.02% |
| File Zip (300 1MB Files) | 62.811 |
72.594 |
15.58% |
| File UnZip (1 300MB File) | 14.383 |
15.500 |
7.77% |
| File UnZip (300 1MB Files) | 14.857 |
20.021 |
34.76% |
| Copy Folder (1 300MB File) | 5.765 |
8.216 |
42.52% |
| Copy Folder (300 1MB Files) | 8.078 |
11.443 |
41.66% |
Real World Performance - Application Load Times (seconds) |
|||
| Photoshop CS | 8.263 |
9.269 |
12.17% |
| Office 2003 - Word | 1.984 |
3.355 |
69.1% |
| Office 2003 - Excel | 2.323 |
2.979 |
28.24% |
| Office 2003 - Access | 1.662 |
3.816 |
29.6% |
| Office 2003 - PowerPoint | 2.289 |
3.823 |
67% |
Real World Performance - Game Level Loading Times (seconds) |
|||
| Half-Life 2 (d1_canals_01) | 23.867 |
21.2 |
-12.58% |
| Doom 3 (caverns1) | 45.667 |
47.567 |
4.16% |
| C&C: Generals (GLA C3S1)* | 34.300 |
34.867 |
1.65% |
Service Time |
|||
| IPEAK Average Read Service Time | 13.82 |
23.31 |
8.13% |
WinBench 99 - Transfer Rate Test |
|||
| Beginning | 59400 |
47200 |
25.85% |
| End | 33800 |
26800 |
26.12% |
*C&C:Generals playing as GLA (campaign 3, stage 1)
The greatest performance increases were seen with our Real World File System Tasks as well as Application Load Time tests. The 7200RPM unit picked up data off its platters much more quickly than the 5400RPM drive. There is no question that a drive's spindle speed has a great effect on the overall performance of the drive. There were certain situations where the spindle speed made no difference like the game level load times, for example. The 5400RPM drive loaded Half-Life 2's d1_canals_01 map more than 2 seconds quicker on average than the 7200RPM mode. Still, this is not a large enough margin to conclude that a higher RPM does not have a positive impact on a drives overall performance.
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AtaStrumf - Thursday, April 21, 2005 - link
#29 - I found a similar test that includes a WD Caviar drive and from what I can tell it is not exactly lagging.http://www.storagereview.com/articles/200504/20050...
Calin - Thursday, April 21, 2005 - link
In "WinBench99" page, you said "The Disk Transfer Rate test reads from the media in a linear fashion from the beginning (inner tracks) to the end (outer tracks)". It's false, the hard drives have the beginning tracks on the outside (well, exterior) of the platters, and the inner drives in the interior part. The reason is that while stationary, the read heads stay outside of the media, and they will reach the outer tracks sooner. Also, on the outer tracks the data density is increased, so the data read and write speed is increased also.emboss - Thursday, April 21, 2005 - link
I'd say you need to ditch Winbench 99 for transfer tests. It's physically impossible for drives to have the same transfer rate on the inside and outside of the platters. Not to mention that the ONLY drives that showed this behaviour were NCQ drives. I suspect what is happening is that the NCQ reordering is stuffing things up by reading the data out-of-order, and that the reordering process delivers the data in one (or several) burst blocks that do not correspond to the real transfer rate off the platters. Maybe HDTach might return more sensible numbers.Lonyo - Thursday, April 21, 2005 - link
Are you going to do some more HDD/NCQ testing when we get more dual core CPU's to test in multi-taking situations?The recent article on the Pentium D shows the benefits of NCQ combined with a dual core CPU (the single core CPU's didn't really show any improvement), so are you going to go more in depth hopefully soon (after you can publish results of AMD X2 CPU's)?
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?...
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?...
jm20 - Thursday, April 21, 2005 - link
How is the 7200.7 120Gb drive louder then a Raptor? My 7200.7 120Gb drive is near SILENT, no where loud as a Raptor. I think your measuring device is off forthe Acoustics test.segagenesis - Thursday, April 21, 2005 - link
#20 - Thats easy. Ignoring the Raptor they are lagging behind on the consumer front compared to others. Last I checked they still charge a fair amount extra for a drive with a FDB motor. The performance just hasnt been up to par either. The days when the "Special Edition" drives were great are gone.Palek - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link
Purav, you did not explain why you chose to test with an nForce chipset over a chipset from intel.For one thing, nVidia's ATA controllers/drivers have a fairly poor track record. I still remember the multitude of problems that cropped up when people installed nVidia ATA drivers on their nForce2 motherboards. I run my nForce2-based computer with MS ATA drivers because I am too afraid that the nVidia drivers will wreck my system (that, and ExactAudioCopy does not recognize any optical drives with the nVidia drivers installed). Admittedly, these issues were driver-related, but then nVidia's checkered past does not boost my confidence in their ability to provide an nForce4 driver that actually works according to spec. Maybe we're seeing no boost with NCQ because of poor implementation, who knows. Testing with just one platform will not reveal such issues.
Also, among other things intel is known for their rock-solid and impressively fast ATA controllers, so an intel chipset would be the obvious platform of choice for testing such new technologies as NCQ.
erwos - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link
"It's mentioned in the article that all of the 7200.8 drives use a 3x133gb platter configuration."This actually isn't true, from what I've read elsewhere. Read the following at StorageReview:
http://www.storagereview.com/articles/200504/20050...
It makes a lot more sense than the "leftover space" theorem.
-Erwos
quorm - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link
xsilver, the drive is not "guaranteed reliable." The only warranty is that if it breaks within five years, they will repair/replace it. There is a possibility that data can be lost from any portion of the drive. You have no way of knowing whether this additional space, if accessible, would be any less reliable than the rest of the drive. Yes, modifying the drive would probably void the warranty, but I'm wondering if Seagate is selling software-limited, yet physically identical drives at different prices, much like with ATI's 9500/9700.Zar0n - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link
With NCQ on u get worst results than with it off.This may be good at servers, but no good at desktop.
I’ll say its bad implemented but, all drivers seem to suffer.
So no NCQ for me...