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Depending on the make of disk, try running the manufacturer's diagnostic utilities - they may give a better idea of any problems.

IBM http://www.storage.ibm.com/hdd/support/download.ht m
Fujitsu http://www.fujitsu.com/au/support/hdd/warranty/
Maxtor http://www.maxtor.com/en/support/downloads/index.h tm
Seagate http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/index.html
Western Digital http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp
Samsung http://www.samsung.com/Support/ProductSupport/inde x.htm

Also today, Seagate launched a family of server-class 2.5" drives sporting 10k rpm and an Ultra320 SCSI or Fibre Channel interface. No details on Seagate's web site yet, though.

What is the kid researching data storage technology doing in the library in the first place? The Net would have much more up to date information than a library would. A quick search on Google reveals almost 6 million results for "data storage technology". While, admittedly, many of the are for online storage services such as XDrive, or manufacturers such as Seagate or APS Tech, there are still quite a few diamonds, such as a webpage about IBM's Millipede storage technology, a Network Computing article on storage disasters, a Bell Labs press release on holographic data storage, etc.

There's just no way a library would buy such obscure and expensive books on data storage technologies when they could be buying children's books, novels, and reference books, which have far wider appeal than stuff on data storage technologies. Anyway, isn't this what the Net's for? To get otherwise obscure, expensive information cheaply and efficiently?

When Microsoft get around to Freeing Windows, perhaps TrollTech will Free the Windows version of Qt?

As another poster points out, wxWindows does a lot of the Qt stuff in the WIMP arena, and I'd like to add that systems like libSDL pretty much cover the unWIMPy, less structured stuff anyway. Having a spectrum of alternatives is good, and since the smallest disk I can buy these days without going out of my way is 40GB, I don't have a problem with installing a dozen or so sets of libraries.

You can read the whole paper here: http://www.seagate.com/content/docs/pdf/whitepaper /D2c_More_than_Interface_ATA_vs_SCSI_042003.pdf

And ask an engineer too: "Good, fast, or cheap: Pick 2". He'll tell you that too. Here's a good read.

Bzzzt, wrong. Please try again. Read this, first. It's better written than my replies. If you already read it, read it again. It does not even mention how inferior the M$ binary and patch distribution method is at keeping the monoculture cleaned. Once a windoze computer is broken, it's typically wiped and reloaded. The poor thing will be broken before it can finish downloading it's first 500MB "patch" from some big dumb M$ "server".

For numbers, free software rulles and runs the internet. Sendmail, exim, etc, are the programs that move your email. Apatche is the program that hosts your web site, Bind and others get you there. Microsoft's move into "serving" has been a disaster wherever anyone has tried it. The result is that M$ continues to lurk in the depths of big dumb clueless nitches of the internet. If Microsoft ever does manage to get IIS's numbers up, it will shut the internet down.

It's dishonest to put the "top ten" lists on the same page. Proportionally, free software has far fewer exploits and breakins. If they were put into a single normalized list, Unix problems would not make the top 100.

Seagate has some amazingly quiet drives based on fluid bearings, I'm assuming that this fairly obvious choice has already occured to you and was deemed unsuitable for some reason.

Barring a regular hard drive, the first and most obvious method is a solid-state disk that's designed for continuous use. They're not cheap, but they're totally silent and quite fast, too.

As was already suggested, a RAM disk that periodically backs itself up to CF would work too. RAM is cheap! If you don't need all that CPU power, consider underclocking your setup to reduce the memory's heat generation, and therefore your fan's duty cycle.

You could try a magneto-optical disk. Some of the old 230MB 3.5" MO drives are nearly silent, and the media's rated for millions of writes and decades in storage. I don't know how noisy the 5.25" versions are, but they should be pretty quiet too, mostly owing to low spin speeds and finely machined parts. Again they'd be better as backing stores for a large RAM disk, due to limited i/o speeds and seek times. Being removable, backups are a piece of cake too.

Laptop hard drives are also pretty quiet, because their spindle RPMs are lower than desktop drives (5400 as opposed to 7200 or 10,000). Their platters are also smaller, meaning that the airspeed of the edge of the platter is much lower, creating less turbulence. Being physically smaller also means that you can mount it in rubber vibration isolators, preventing the computer's case from acting as a sounding board for spindle noise and seek clatter.

Also, check hard drive makers' websites for quiet seek modes. The drive's firmware can choose to drive the head servo in a noisy "performance" mode, or to smooth out the edges of the seek motions in a "quiet" mode. It results in a modest performance drop but a distinct reduction in noise.

Next step: Throw the entire computer into an acoustic printer enclosure. Back when impact dot matrix printers were the norm (and they still are in businesses that use multipart forms), everyone hated the racket they made. Elaborate printer cages were built, lined with acoustic foam and equipped with quiet fans to keep the occupant cool. This will drop a few decibels off any obnoxious machine, and they're designed to be easily opened for paper feeding, ribbon changing, etc. The only downside is bulk.

You can also throw bits of acoustoabsorbent foam into the computer's case wherever you find room. I live a few miles from a foam supplier so I picked up a few scraps. Rubber cement or spray-on adhesive work well. Any car stereo shop can sell you little bits of Dynamat, with a self-adhesive backing. An ITX case won't afford much space, but every little bit helps to cut down on panel vibrations and reflected noise.

Good luck!

I think you are misremembering, at least in the sense that you certainly don't have the transition time pegged (if there was one at all). My first hard drive was a Seagate ST-296N. This was nominally an 85 megabyte drive. Seagate kindly keeps basic data sheets online even for dinosaurs:

ST-296N

Spec of interest: sectors per drive, 165,851 for the 296N. Each sector stores 512 bytes, so the exact capacity works out to 84,915,712 bytes, which is only 85 megabytes if you're counting using powers of 10. Power-of-2 capacity was about 81 MB.

Some have claimed that the transition happened after MFM and RLL disks. I find this dubious. Not only do I remember having to explain to countless owners of such disks why they had less capacity than they were supposed to, consider this old MFM drive:

ST-225

21.4 MB advertised capacity, 41,820 sectors per drive = 21,411,840 bytes. Same deal.

In my experience the main thing which wasn't really standardized back in the MFM/RLL era was how much space would be taken up by spare sectors. It was hard for manufacturers to give an accurate number of user-visible sectors because not every MFM/RLL controller formatted with the same sparing scheme. ATA and SCSI moved the controller onboard the drive, and therefore it became easier for manufacturers to quote exact capacities (in whatever units they might have been using, and in my experience, the unit of choice was always a power of 10).

I think you are misremembering, at least in the sense that you certainly don't have the transition time pegged (if there was one at all). My first hard drive was a Seagate ST-296N. This was nominally an 85 megabyte drive. Seagate kindly keeps basic data sheets online even for dinosaurs:

ST-296N

Spec of interest: sectors per drive, 165,851 for the 296N. Each sector stores 512 bytes, so the exact capacity works out to 84,915,712 bytes, which is only 85 megabytes if you're counting using powers of 10. Power-of-2 capacity was about 81 MB.

Some have claimed that the transition happened after MFM and RLL disks. I find this dubious. Not only do I remember having to explain to countless owners of such disks why they had less capacity than they were supposed to, consider this old MFM drive:

ST-225

21.4 MB advertised capacity, 41,820 sectors per drive = 21,411,840 bytes. Same deal.

In my experience the main thing which wasn't really standardized back in the MFM/RLL era was how much space would be taken up by spare sectors. It was hard for manufacturers to give an accurate number of user-visible sectors because not every MFM/RLL controller formatted with the same sparing scheme. ATA and SCSI moved the controller onboard the drive, and therefore it became easier for manufacturers to quote exact capacities (in whatever units they might have been using, and in my experience, the unit of choice was always a power of 10).

For the price you pay, 2.5" drives are horribly inefficient, and nowhere near as fast as 3.5" models.

Talking about the models reviewed, yes, but that's soon to change, very soon. Seagate's Small Form Factor drives will be around next year. At 10,000 rpm and with a U320 SCSI, Fibre Channel, or Serial-Attached SCSI interface, they're as fast or faster than most of the 3.5" drives out there. The platters in the 3.5" enterprise drives are as small as the ones in the 2.5" anyway, and you'll (almost) be able to fit 4 2.5" drives in the space of one 3.5".

That 270 megabit speed is just 33.75 megabytes per second. The latest Seagate SATA 7200 RPM drives are have a sustained write speed of 32 to 58 megabytes per second. See the PDF spec for more information. These drives are not exactly speed demons and most 7200 RPM IDE drives from the last few years will be able to handle that fairly easily.

This is not the stretch you seem to be making it out to be.

Maxtor's Powermax
Western Digital's Data Lifeguard Tools (You only need the Diagnostics module. There's also a Windows version farther down.)
Hitachi GS (Including IBM drives) Drive Fitness Test (Also check out SMART Defender, farther down, for a lightweight windows systray icon to monitor all your drive's SMART status.)
Seagate's SeaTools (Or try a direct link to the file to avoid registration.)

If you've got an off-brand drive, you can check the manufacturer website to see if they have one, or just try one of the above, I believe all of them can run at least basic dagnostics on any drive.

Maxtor's Powermax
Western Digital's Data Lifeguard Tools (You only need the Diagnostics module. There's also a Windows version farther down.)
Hitachi GS (Including IBM drives) Drive Fitness Test (Also check out SMART Defender, farther down, for a lightweight windows systray icon to monitor all your drive's SMART status.)
Seagate's SeaTools (Or try a direct link to the file to avoid registration.)

If you've got an off-brand drive, you can check the manufacturer website to see if they have one, or just try one of the above, I believe all of them can run at least basic dagnostics on any drive.

You really cant compare things like that for databases. AISITA (as is stated in the article) the big bottlenecks for both are similar in nature but orders of magnitude in scope. I currently work with a medical database where everything has to be logged. Disk access is a big factor for us, so we use fibre channel scsi (specifically Seagate 73.4GB 10000RPM) where the cost is more like 700 dollars for 70gb) (basically $10 per GB not the $1 per GB you are showing) Also there is the issue of supporting hardware but we will ignore that for the time being.

time for some napkin math:

1 512MB ecc reg pc2100 dim -> $ 78 or $156GB

1 70GB Fibre Channel Drive -> $700 or $ 10GB

Now lets factor in raid (for access speed and redundancy)

we typically put 8 drives in a bundle which tends to give us 36% of the total drive capacity (mirrored raid 5 aka raid 6 remember teh ram is ecc reg so this factoring is already in place for it)
8 * $700 -> $5600 for
36% * 8 * 70 = 200GB
This give me approximately 1GB for $28
now thats a factor of 5.6 (call it 6) in price from ram only. AND i still get a prolly 4 fold increase in throughput. Not bad at all in my book.

WHAT?

40 MB ST251 MFM drive (c) 1990: 3600 RPM @ 40 mS seek time.

40 GB ST340014A ATA Drive (c) 2002: 7200 RPM @ 8.5 mS seek time.

It seems like a 6 times increase (give or take) in speed to me in just over 10 years.

WHAT?

40 MB ST251 MFM drive (c) 1990: 3600 RPM @ 40 mS seek time.

40 GB ST340014A ATA Drive (c) 2002: 7200 RPM @ 8.5 mS seek time.

It seems like a 6 times increase (give or take) in speed to me in just over 10 years.

Interestingly, a desktop harddrive consumes about 17 watts in typical operation. So the 10 Watt figure is likely optimistic and/or when no peripheral devices are being used.

Maybe I'm nitpicking but I think 17 watts is a bit high. A Seagate Barracuda V (typical harddrive for a homebox/mediabox setup; high capacity, low price and low noice) has these power requirements:
+12 VDC +/-10% (amps typ operating) 2.8
+5 VDC +/-5% (amps typ operating) 0.844

Power Management (watts)
Seek 13
Read/Write 12
Idle 9.5
Standby 0.7

If I remember right Fujitsu have a series of harddrives with even lower power requirements; down towards 10 watts as max power consumtion.
Or you can get a hard-drive made for mobile computers; they have power consumption below 6 watts (lower capacity though).

As far as shocks, they're rated 350g unpowered. More likely to survive a car crash than the human occupants :-)

With 261,000 hard drives, and each hard drive to say operate for 250,000 hours mean-time between failures, there could be a disk failure about each hour within the system!!

Uhm, MTBF doesn't exactly work like that. Assuming they buy drives in 10k batches, that means they have approximately 285k hours before all 10k drives reach the end of their guaranteed reliability period. The drives in my home servers and the SOHO servers I've implemented tend to live out their MTBF ratings in active use, then gain an additional hundred thousand hours or so of use in a workstation or two before being retired.

If you buy cheap, faulty, low-quality hard drives, yes, you're going to encounter drive failures on a regular basis.

Any organization rolling out tens or hundreds of thousands of drives who doesn't do their research (and testing) first deserves whatever they get. (And purchasing for servers the above referenced "value" drives - a class suitable only for home user desktops - is definately a first class blunder)

Moreover, they aren't terribly likely to be implementing "value" drives (the ones that typically come with such low MTBF ratings), but more likely something like the WD Raptor, Seagate Cheetah 10k.6 or similar with 1.2 million hour MTBF ratings.

1). tomsrtbt Linux on a floppy - essential!
2). Windows 98SE boot floppy
3). Knoppix 3.2 bottable Linux on a CD.
4). Memtest86 bootable CD for testing RAM - excellent!
5). DOS freeware F-Prot and recent virus definitions
6). Norton's DOS utilities
7). Various HD setup utilities (eg: Western Digital, Seagate boot floppies)
8). Freesco Linux router/webserver on a floppy
9). Sample linux config files (eg: XFConfig-4, fstab, etc)
10). Frozen-Bubble bootable CD for times of stress

I made a Fibre Channel array like this last year. The only difference being that I used a Mylex eXtremeRAID 3000 (eBay for $200), a 256MB Crucial DIMM for cache, and four Seagate ST39102FC 9GB 10,000 RPM disks.

My whole point to the project was EXTREMELY fast disk access (up to ~160MB/sec sustained transfers, see here) that I could locate at the far end of a REALLY long cable. I've got my machine in my office and the hard drives on the other end of a 30m cable, nestled nicely down in the basement where I cannot hear it.

There are a few basic pictures of the external assembly available here. Works really, really well. It's amazing what hugely fast disk IO does for the rest of a machine.

I made a Fibre Channel array like this last year. The only difference being that I used a Mylex eXtremeRAID 3000 (eBay for $200), a 256MB Crucial DIMM for cache, and four Seagate ST39102FC 9GB 10,000 RPM disks.

My whole point to the project was EXTREMELY fast disk access (up to ~160MB/sec sustained transfers, see here) that I could locate at the far end of a REALLY long cable. I've got my machine in my office and the hard drives on the other end of a 30m cable, nestled nicely down in the basement where I cannot hear it.

There are a few basic pictures of the external assembly available here. Works really, really well. It's amazing what hugely fast disk IO does for the rest of a machine.

Too bad whoever wrote that was completely full of it. Fibre Channel does not exist over coax or twisted pair.

Too bad you're full of shit and your little outburst will make you look like a moron.

Here's one example, here's another and here is yet another.

According to Google, there are about 5,500 pages that disagree with you.

seems ot kill most of our equipment around the end of thier warrenty periods

If I was really cynical, I would say that Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology could be used to deliberately smoke a hard disc at a random moment three to six months after the end of its warranty period...

Seagate made good drives back then also.

The 20GB 5.25" 1/2 height drive was a disaster. I worked in a clone shop in those days & half the drives I pulled from stock failed, with a good number failing before the customer even took the machine home (burn-in was usually ~1 day).

However, the 20GB 3.5" drive was faster (40ms vs 65ms average seek) and I never had one fail. It was more expensive and one of the first drives in that form factor.

I had few failures with the 40GB 5.25" 1/2 heights . The 30GB RLLs failed completely less often than the 20GB MFMs, but had horrible data corruption problems.

My favorite drives were the 40GB full-height drives. They used some kind of linear actuator instead of a swing-arm for the heads & shook the whole bench when running seek tests. Start-up currents are instructive (12V supply): 4A for the ST4051 full-height 5.25", 2.4A for the ST225 1/2 height 5.25" and 2A for the ST125 1/2 height 3.5".

Anyone know if the 20GB MFM coincided with a new factory opening in Singapore?

This post on the Classic Computing mailing list has more.

Also search for segate st225 quality at Google...

Seagate made good drives back then also.

The 20GB 5.25" 1/2 height drive was a disaster. I worked in a clone shop in those days & half the drives I pulled from stock failed, with a good number failing before the customer even took the machine home (burn-in was usually ~1 day).

However, the 20GB 3.5" drive was faster (40ms vs 65ms average seek) and I never had one fail. It was more expensive and one of the first drives in that form factor.

I had few failures with the 40GB 5.25" 1/2 heights . The 30GB RLLs failed completely less often than the 20GB MFMs, but had horrible data corruption problems.

My favorite drives were the 40GB full-height drives. They used some kind of linear actuator instead of a swing-arm for the heads & shook the whole bench when running seek tests. Start-up currents are instructive (12V supply): 4A for the ST4051 full-height 5.25", 2.4A for the ST225 1/2 height 5.25" and 2A for the ST125 1/2 height 3.5".

Anyone know if the 20GB MFM coincided with a new factory opening in Singapore?

This post on the Classic Computing mailing list has more.

Also search for segate st225 quality at Google...

Seagate made good drives back then also.

The 20GB 5.25" 1/2 height drive was a disaster. I worked in a clone shop in those days & half the drives I pulled from stock failed, with a good number failing before the customer even took the machine home (burn-in was usually ~1 day).

However, the 20GB 3.5" drive was faster (40ms vs 65ms average seek) and I never had one fail. It was more expensive and one of the first drives in that form factor.

I had few failures with the 40GB 5.25" 1/2 heights . The 30GB RLLs failed completely less often than the 20GB MFMs, but had horrible data corruption problems.

My favorite drives were the 40GB full-height drives. They used some kind of linear actuator instead of a swing-arm for the heads & shook the whole bench when running seek tests. Start-up currents are instructive (12V supply): 4A for the ST4051 full-height 5.25", 2.4A for the ST225 1/2 height 5.25" and 2A for the ST125 1/2 height 3.5".

Anyone know if the 20GB MFM coincided with a new factory opening in Singapore?

This post on the Classic Computing mailing list has more.

Also search for segate st225 quality at Google...

Seagate made good drives back then also.

The 20GB 5.25" 1/2 height drive was a disaster. I worked in a clone shop in those days & half the drives I pulled from stock failed, with a good number failing before the customer even took the machine home (burn-in was usually ~1 day).

However, the 20GB 3.5" drive was faster (40ms vs 65ms average seek) and I never had one fail. It was more expensive and one of the first drives in that form factor.

I had few failures with the 40GB 5.25" 1/2 heights . The 30GB RLLs failed completely less often than the 20GB MFMs, but had horrible data corruption problems.

My favorite drives were the 40GB full-height drives. They used some kind of linear actuator instead of a swing-arm for the heads & shook the whole bench when running seek tests. Start-up currents are instructive (12V supply): 4A for the ST4051 full-height 5.25", 2.4A for the ST225 1/2 height 5.25" and 2A for the ST125 1/2 height 3.5".

Anyone know if the 20GB MFM coincided with a new factory opening in Singapore?

This post on the Classic Computing mailing list has more.

Also search for segate st225 quality at Google...

Seagate made good drives back then also.

The 20GB 5.25" 1/2 height drive was a disaster. I worked in a clone shop in those days & half the drives I pulled from stock failed, with a good number failing before the customer even took the machine home (burn-in was usually ~1 day).

However, the 20GB 3.5" drive was faster (40ms vs 65ms average seek) and I never had one fail. It was more expensive and one of the first drives in that form factor.

I had few failures with the 40GB 5.25" 1/2 heights . The 30GB RLLs failed completely less often than the 20GB MFMs, but had horrible data corruption problems.

My favorite drives were the 40GB full-height drives. They used some kind of linear actuator instead of a swing-arm for the heads & shook the whole bench when running seek tests. Start-up currents are instructive (12V supply): 4A for the ST4051 full-height 5.25", 2.4A for the ST225 1/2 height 5.25" and 2A for the ST125 1/2 height 3.5".

Anyone know if the 20GB MFM coincided with a new factory opening in Singapore?

This post on the Classic Computing mailing list has more.

Also search for segate st225 quality at Google...

I wrote Seagate sales an email earlier this month asking why the home page of their web site says, "Available now - The Barracuda ATA V" when it isn't actually possible to purchase one of those drives. They replied that the drives have been shipping to OEMs, but not to the retail channel.

The email also said that SATA Barracuda V drives were supposed to start shipping to the retail channel in late December, but I haven't seen one show up as "in stock" on CDW or pricewatch.com yet.

Seagate UK kindly have supplied us with one of their new Serial ATA hard drives. We take a look at the new SATA format and attempt to determine what the new format means in real life. Will SATA produce any real improvement in performance?

Before we begin looking at the physical drive it is worth reading a little about the SATA format. The following extract from Seagate's web site provides us with an insight into the serial ATA standard and more importantly it's expected development path.

About the Serial ATA (SATA) format

Most desktop storage systems today use a parallel bus interface referred to as Ultra ATA/100. The parallel ATA interface has been in use on desktop systems as the mainstream internal storage inter-connect, since the 1980\'s (over 15 years!). Today\'s PCs demand higher speeds, more robust data integrity and flexibility for innovative smaller designs. Physically and electrically, the current parallel bus has run into limitations that will prevent this bus from providing higher speeds of data transfers. The move to a new technology is inevitable in the eyes of industry leaders such as Intel, Dell, Seagate, Maxtor and APT.

These same leaders formed the SerialATA.org and are highly dedicated to bringing this new technology to the forefront of today\'s PCs. Serial ATA is designed to overcome the limitations of parallel ATA while providing scalability for years to come. Setting the goal to be compatible and at cost parity with current parallel ATA drives when in volume, the SerialATA organization is promoting the adoption of Serial ATA in all systems where ATA drives are being used today.

What is Serial ATA?

Serial ATA is a \"serial\" architecture as opposed to today\'s \"parallel\" ATA internal disc drive bus. Serial ATA wraps many bits of data into a packet and then at a higher speed (up to 50% higher) than parallel, transfers the packet of data down the wire to or from the host. Today Cyclic Redundancy Checking (CRC) is performed on the data being transmitted back and forth but not on the commands. Serial ATA integrates CRC on the command and data packet level for enhanced bus reliability. Cyclic redundancy code detects all single and double-bit errors and ensures detection of 99.998% of all possible errors. A Serial ATA drive can transfer data at 150MB/sec on the bus to the host system with extremely reliable accuracy and the Serial ATA interface will continue to allow scalability for a very long time.

Generation 1Generation 2Generation 3 Approximate Data Rate150mb/sec300mb/sec600mb/sec Approximate Bus Speed1.5gb/sec4gb/sec6gb/sec Approximate IntroductionFall of \'02Mid \'04Mid \'07

Additional Benefits

In addition to a faster, more reliable bus, Serial ATA improves cabling and connectors for a robust yet simpler integration. Gone are the days of bent pins and clumsy cabling and needless returned hard drives. Serial ATA cables are thinner and longer for improved system airflow and innovative system designs such as small form factor and consumer electronic boxes. Connectors are easier to snap into place without any pins but rather a blind-mate type of connection. Without the wide cables, system integrators can easily route the longer data cables (1 meter) within the system for simplicity or innovative designs.

Seagate Technology, A Native in Serial ATA Still in its early market entry stage, Serial ATA provides immediate benefits to desktop users. Serial ATA, an innovative new interface, allows continued performance growth, enhanced data reliability, and overall improved system dynamics above and beyond what Parallel can efficiently continue to provide.

A true \"Native\" Serial ATA solution offers customers the \"Real McCoy\" in Serial ATA technology. By implementing Serial ATA technology, not only on the physical layer of the drive, but also in the ATA controller link and transport layers, Seagate drives can communicate from the drive to the host directly up to the full 150MB/sec speed on the bus. In addition, the native solution incorporates command queuing, which can be a big performance boost in operating systems that can take advantage of that type of function. Some drive manufacturers may not immediately offer these \"native\" Serial ATA features on their 1st generation Serial ATA drives due to the difficulty of this integration.

The drive it\'s self looks just like any other computer hard disk drive. Consistent with other Seagate barracuda drives this one is very well built, solid and as attractive as a rectangular box of metal and plastic can be. The label clearly identifies the drive and provides setup information.

Review ModelSeagate ST380023AS Size80gb Speed7,200rpm Seek Time (Average)9ms InterfaceSerial ATA

Here is the description of the drive from Seagate\'s web site...

Seagate\'s Barracuda ATA V with Serial ATA Interface leverages the mechanics of the industry\'s quietest 7200 rpm desktop drive. The Barracuda ATA V offers 80GB and 120GB capacities with an 8MB cache for mainstream, high performance PCs, and entry-level servers. The product features all FDB motors, superior reliability and the next generation interface - Serial ATA. The SATA Barracuda includes Seagate\'s exclusive 3D Defense System and a one-year limited warranty.

FeaturesBenefits 7,200 RPM desktop performanceImproves overall PC performance 350 Gs nonoperating shockProtects drive from shock and vibration 3D Defense SystemIndustry\'s most comprehensive drive and data protection system DiscWizard softwareWorld\'s best disc installation software utility SoftSonic(TM) FDB motorQuietest acoustics on any desktop drive 8-Mbyte cache bufferImproved performance Serial ATA interfaceFastest data transfer rates

The Test Drive II

SATA drives can not be connected to your computer with the standard IDE and Molex power connectors as becomes clear when viewing the back of the drive. Two new interfaces are need to use the drive. If you have a motherboard with serial ATA support you will have probably been supplied with an SATA data cable as shown below. However you will also need a Molex to SATA power conversion lead which is not supplied with either the motherboard or hard drive. I can foresee this power lead becoming a source of frustration for many people ordering SATA drives, hopefully when the drives hit the retail market the cable will be supplied with the hard drive.

Connecting the drive is very easy indeed. The SATA connectors are very well designed and will only fit the correct way round. There are no pins to bend or break as the fittings are more like USB than IDE.

Currently motherboards with SATA connectors run via the PCI bus. Some have connection via a SATA RAID controller, but our test board used a single SATA connector which is linked to a stand alone SATA controller chip. Once installed and booted the drive was displayed in the Bios taking the place of the primary IDE device. Windows XP located the drive as new hardware and the drive was fully visible. The Seagate drive is fully SMART enabled. This gives access to drive monitoring information including temperature.

Benchmarks I

Test Setup

• DFI NB80-EA Granite Bay motherboard
• P4 2.66Mhz CPU, 512MB DDR3500 RAM
• Seagate 80GB SATA150 Hard Disk Drive
• Maxtor 120GB 8MB ATA133 Cache Hard Drive on IDE
• Maxtor 60GB 2MB ATA100 Cache Hard Drive
• 2 Weston Digital 80GB 8MB Cache drives on Promise Raid Controller on Raid0
• Speedfan utility for SMART monitoring including hard drive temperature

HD Tech - Read Results Graph

The HD Tech benchmark is recognised as the most comprehensive hard drive test available. The benchmark evaluates the Hard drives performance across the whole drive regardless of how the drive is partitioned. It is common for performance to drop the further into the drive the test goes. This is due to the sectors at the end of the disk being physically further from the drives starting point.

Seagate SATA ATA150

Maxtor ATA133

The graphs above show two interesting trends. Although the computer was able to read information from the Maxtor drive faster than the Seagate drive, the opposite is true when it comes to writing data. The Seagate drive shows a consistent write speed with a few downward troughs, where as the Maxtor drive shows a few peaks in performance. Secondly although both drives show the expected reduction in read speed the further into the drive the test goes, the Seagate drive shows a slower decline dropping from circa 40k to 25k. The Maxtor drops more steeply from 50k down to 25k.

The graphs below show the results of all the HD Tech tests carried out during the review. As the benchmark requires unpartitioned drives to test writing speeds only two drives were able to be tested, the Seagate SATA and the Maxtor 120GB 8MB Cache.

Read speed average results

Write speed average results

The Seagate SATA drive did not perform as well as we had hoped in the read tests. Performance was lower than the other 8MB Cache drives whether in a raid configuration or straight forward IDE. The drive is far from being slow, but with the same 8MB Cache and the equivalent of ATA150 transfer speeds we hoped for more. Despite the average scores showing lower the Seagate drive did display better consistency across the drive as a whole and also proved significantly better in the write tests, some 30% better than the Maxtor.

Sandra Benchmark

The Sandra benchmark is less reliable than the HD Tech because it tests a partition rather than the whole drive and as we have seen performance changes depending on where on the drive the partition is located. When testing for the review we ensured that all the test drives had the same sized partition and that it was at the start of the physical disk.

The results show the same story as HD tech, although we are unable to break down the Sandra scores to establish where the Seagate drive falls down.

Hot Swapping

An interesting attribute associated with SATA devices is that they should be \'Hot Swappable\', that means that you should be able to move devices around while your operating system is running. On the face of it this would be very useful. Care must be taken when moving hard disks around because while the internal discs are spinning damage can be caused easily. With the SATA drive installed as a non system disk we were able to disconnect the drive with windows XP running. Unlike USB device when removed, windows did not realise that the drive was no longer connected and it remained visible!

Noise

Seagate have produced a very well built drive in the ST380023AS. The casing is very solid and the mechanism well balanced. As a result it is most defiantly the quietest hard disk drive I have ever used. If you are looking for an ultra quiet drive then this one should be on your shopping list.

Reliability

The test drive was run continually for a week cycling the Sandra benchmark. Although the drive can get quite hot, rising to 45c under very heavy load, it performed without fault. SMART monitoring did not detect any problems during our testing. It should be remembered that a weeks hard testing does not give any real indication of the drives long term reliability, but we can take a great deal of comfort from the fact that the IDE Barracuda drives have proven to be one of the most reliable in the market thus far.

Price

Although SATA drives have not hit the retail market place in the UK yet The 80GB Seagate drive is expected to retail for circa £115 including VAT. This puts a small premium on the SATA format.

The read performance of the Seagate ST380023AS was not as good as we had hoped for. On the other hand write performance was better than we hoped for. In summary one fact is clear, the SATA interface works differently to the IDE interface and when you consider that this is a first generation SATA drive, linked to a motherboard that has the SATA interface located on the PCI bus, limiting it's potential, the overall performance is very good indeed.

The benefits of ultra fast data writing would make this drive ideal for write hungry tasks like video rendering or data backup. The Seagate drive itself is very well made and seems to be very robust. Its quiet operation makes it ideal for inclusion in a system where quietness is of benefit.

Serial ATA is in its infancy. Seagate have produced an excellent hard disk drive at the high quality end of the market place which should be very well received. I for one will be very sorry to have to part with this drive when Seagate ask for it back.

Pros

• Very Quiet
• Robust
• Very fast write performance
• Simple SATA data cable connection

Cons

• Needs power adapter (Not supplied)
• Slower read performance than expected
• SATA comes at a price premium

incidentally, my cheetah 15k.3 drive does between 600-890Mbit/sec, which is between 75 and 111 MByte/sec

The spec sheet says 49-75 MB/s sustained transfers -- which is still really fast, but not as fast as you quoted.

The spec sheet is here.

Note that modern IDE drives come pretty close to this. I do consider myself a `SCSI bigot', but I must acknowledge that modern IDE drives do haul much ass. The problem is that they require massive amounts of your system's CPU to do so. SCSI is much nicer to your system -- but much harder to your pocketbook (seems like the price differential lately has been around 5:1 for SCSI vs IDE. Ugh!)

It's only one year now :) For Maxtor. For Seagate. I'm not gonna list more. You can look for them yourself, but I think you get the point. :)

Surely your company can afford you one of these. It will handle all your space problems with ease. We are getting one at my work (although we are getting the single tape version since we are only backing up 100G)

http://rss.seagate.com/products/srssDrives/STUL620 001LW-S.html

Still, I'd trust an expensive 5400RPM drive much more than a 15000RPM drive. Those high-speed drives pump out enormous heat, and I'd be surprised if their reliability was any better than an IDE drive.

I've been following these and there's a number of manufacturers planning to make them available, Maxtor, Seagate, Western Digital, Fujitsu, et al, but dates have been pushed back. Seagate was to be shipping ST380023AS and ST3120023AS drives in late October, now I'm seeing late November or even December. Maxtor has stated they will ship in December, others I haven't found out about. There will be a SATA group presence at COMDEX. Here's a source of information, but it tends to be general and dated, aside from having some technical docs online, too.

I've been following these and there's a number of manufacturers planning to make them available, Maxtor, Seagate, Western Digital, Fujitsu, et al, but dates have been pushed back. Seagate was to be shipping ST380023AS and ST3120023AS drives in late October, now I'm seeing late November or even December. Maxtor has stated they will ship in December, others I haven't found out about. There will be a SATA group presence at COMDEX. Here's a source of information, but it tends to be general and dated, aside from having some technical docs online, too.

I have to agree with alsta here and vehemently disagree with the moderation "flamebait."

Lets got over this supposed flamebait.
* SCSI has much better seek times than IDE disks
This is irrefutable. This is in industry rule. I refer people to the fastest hard drive I could think off the top of my head here: http://www.storage.ibm.com/hdd/desk/ds180gxp.htm Deskstar 180GXP - Average seek time - 8.5 ms
and to here: http://www.seagate.com/cda/products/discsales/mark eting/detail/0,1081,549,00.html 15K.3 Model Number: ST373453LC Seek time: 3.6 ms avg

Now, I don't know about you people but an increase in seek performance that is easily 2.4 times better that the best IDE for something that occurs that many times a second, well, I'm convinced that the drive is considerably faster. Think of any "worst case" scenarios, and this extra speed is likely never to go un-wasted on a computer.

I am also in accord with alsta's skepticism that SATA will be anything but a consumer grade technology. I am an ardent supporter of Firewire and SCSI, and it clear the SCSI standard has much to offer because implementations of SCSI over IP are planned to deprecate FC in favor of iSCSI over 10GE. To me this SATA is a day late and performance short. I think it is nice we can now clean up the crap connectors, but I will not be deluded into believing that SATA has a prayer in terms of beating SCSI.

I also have seen many reviews on IDE RAID and must concur that it is nearly impossible to IDE up to single drive SCSI performance without doing some hardcore RAID-ing. I cannot provide links to support this statement, but peruse through a site like Storage Review and you can see clearly where and why and how SCSI drives cremate their IDE counterparts.

I have IDE and would buy SATA for mass cheap storage at home, but it was a sad day when PC vendors stopped offerering SCSI upgrades from the factory on their cheesier machines and Apple stopped using them by default. This essentially was the advent of the "Geo" or "Kia" of the computer world. I hate hackneyed car analogies, but in this case, as I have seen in acerbic reviews of the said cars, "Why buy this cars where there are better used ones around?", directly applies. I can think of many "used" scsi drives and how badly they destroy consumer grade stuff with ease. This is both from L&F and measure performance metrics.

IDE does not support tagged commands, and it is still unclear if SATA's implementation will be as robust as SCSI. This alsta's statement is again correct with regards to terrible simultaneous access. Try running a busy Unix box with 100s of people copying files and doing this or that, compiling crap, etc. The disk needs to be serious about handling jumpy situations. Seek time and command tagging comes in handy here.

Unfortunately larger buffers can only mask problems. There are many situations where consistency is not guaranteed, and where the cache can easily be blown. I like buffers to be there to make an already fast situations move along more regularly, like a capacitor helps regulate power. I don't like an already bad situations being masked by case specific buffering optimizations.

I will ,as alsta indicates he will, continue to use SCSI as my most preferred storage bus. I cannot think of reasons not to, if I have an dumping ground for "crap" in my IDE large capacity hard drives. Also suspect is the standard being ratified over a year ago and nothing materializing yet. Also, I think the SMART works better in SCSI, I think sector sparing is essential and IDE and apparently SATA wont do that, and I like 5 year drive warranties not ONE like most IDE drives moved to now, and I liked support, and I like knowing that the company I bought the device from made an okay profit so I can get amenities like advanced replacement. It's a preferred choice, and if you can afford it, so it.

Just because you may not be able to afford it or don't think storage is not the way you should spend your hard earned money, don't knock SCSI. And certainly don't come to Slashdot and suppress other people's views on the subject.

Well... Seagate has announced their first SATA drives, the Cuda ATA V, but they haven't hit the shelves yet as far as I can tell. It is supposed to be available this fall... so they should be out soon. Also, the Cuda V is a true SATA drive, not just an IDE drive with a bridge slapped on it.

Well... Seagate has announced their first SATA drives, the Cuda ATA V, but they haven't hit the shelves yet as far as I can tell. It is supposed to be available this fall... so they should be out soon. Also, the Cuda V is a true SATA drive, not just an IDE drive with a bridge slapped on it.

Well... Seagate has announced their first SATA drives, the Cuda ATA V, but they haven't hit the shelves yet as far as I can tell. It is supposed to be available this fall... so they should be out soon. Also, the Cuda V is a true SATA drive, not just an IDE drive with a bridge slapped on it.

Yes, I checked out IBM's drive list and find several 7200 RPM scsi drives. I assume they are slightly older models (but up to 40 GB), but they're there. Seagate's page shows some as well -- up to 181 GB. So there goes your "duh" solution.

Also, my post contained that as a question, followed by a statement that I might be wrong in one of my assumptions. I'd like to thank everyone else, all of whom responded to my questions with actual helpful information and reasonable explanations, and did so without being rude. Amazing.

-Puk

Seagate

Western Digital

Maxtor

Quantum

The IBM 120GXP (IC35L120) in the test supports this, and this implies that Seagate are doing this kind of "seek shaping" now and plan to extend the facility to OEMs, so that they can customize acoustic performance for the application e.g. PVR. Where possible, the review tests should have been done using either extreme. (They don't say whether the drives were seeking during the noise test, though. I hope they were, otherwise the noise tests would be half-baked.)

One comes up on Pricewatch and Google, which frequently highlights vendors, has only brought up articles, reviews, passing references for the ST3120023AS

Note: The second Seagate link gives some idea of where SATA is going, starting at 150MBytes/sec external transfer speed, yet their tech spec indicates 150Mbits/sec. So far benchs show no advantage, unless you prefer/need the wiring change. Your milage may vary.

One comes up on Pricewatch and Google, which frequently highlights vendors, has only brought up articles, reviews, passing references for the ST3120023AS

Note: The second Seagate link gives some idea of where SATA is going, starting at 150MBytes/sec external transfer speed, yet their tech spec indicates 150Mbits/sec. So far benchs show no advantage, unless you prefer/need the wiring change. Your milage may vary.

One comes up on Pricewatch and Google, which frequently highlights vendors, has only brought up articles, reviews, passing references for the ST3120023AS

Note: The second Seagate link gives some idea of where SATA is going, starting at 150MBytes/sec external transfer speed, yet their tech spec indicates 150Mbits/sec. So far benchs show no advantage, unless you prefer/need the wiring change. Your milage may vary.

Drive manufacturers already provide this kind of information on the data sheets for their products. For example, the data sheet for the Seagate Barracuda ATA IV drives says that the current draw for that drive is 2.8 amps @ 12 VDC and 1.2 amps @ 5 VDC (same numbers for all capacities). It even indicates the typical power consumption during seek, read/write, idle, and standby.

Thus, as you can see, there's no need to stick an ammetre into the power leads when you can read a piece of paper (or a web page) to figure this stuff out.

good ole slashdot. 'of course its an xbox problem'.