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17 Serial ATA Hard Drives Compared
TheRaindog writes "The Tech Report has an in-depth look at Maxtor's DiamondMax 11 hard drive that provides some interesting insight on how Seagate's recent acquisition can improve deficiencies in its own drives. More valuable, however, is the fact that the review offers a detailed comparison of 17 different Serial ATA drives from Hitachi, Maxtor, Samsung, Seagate, and Western Digital. Performance is compared across a wide range of typical desktop, multitasking, and multi-user loads, and noise levels and power consumption tests also provide interesting results. Definitely worth a look for anyone in the market for a new hard drive."
These things are loud, especially under load. As quiet as rainfall and as loud as normal conversation?
I was not too happy to learn of the merger~boyout, and while the article hints at optimism, I definitely get the sense of a rolling of eyes out there. Competition is what spurs creativity and success. We shall see.
FairTax baby!
I'm in the market for one of these -- SATA 500, to match an existing RAID array. Unfortunately, these benchmark numbers just don't tell the whole story. While WD's 500GB RE2 has some of the best stats on the charts, the reliability reviews (at least on Newegg) are dismal. Sadly, this matches with my own experiences with WD.
I'll gladly sacrifice a few percentage points of performance if it means increased reliability, especially when we're talking HD's. I already don't trust the things farther than I can throw 'em (thus the RAID-5).
What you want is irrelevant; what you've chosen is at hand! - Spock, ST VI
More valuable, however, is the fact that the review offers a detailed comparison of 17 different Serial ATA drives from Hitachi, Maxtor, Samsung, Seagate, and Western Digital. Performance is compared across a wide range of typical desktop, multitasking, and multi-user loads, and noise levels and power consumption tests also provide interesting results. Definitely worth a look for anyone in the market for a new hard drive.
It would have been interesting had they done a comparison with one of the Asus Z62F solid state machines that uses flash ram as a hard drive.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Also included: a comparison of fireproof suits with shock wave absorbers.
I'd like to see how the current crop of flash disks compare, in SATA, ATA and SCSI format.
Deleted
The Tech Report has an in-depth look at Maxtor's DiamondMax 11 hard drive that provides some interesting insight on how Seagate's recent acquisition can improve deficiencies in its own drives.
Like better SMART support on Seagate's side? I was stunned at how much more SMART capabilities Maxtor drives have compared to Seagates and others. It should almost be a crime to produce a drive that doesn't have a SMART compatible error log (which Maxtors have- you can query it and see when+what the last errors were, for starters.)
I've also been stunned at how BAD modern drives are; a client lost FOUR maxtor drives out of a 12 drive array in the space of 2-3 months, and we literally couldn't replace them fast enough (also, the idiots that he bought the system from TURNED OFF autoverify on the 3ware controller, didn't install the linux drivers, didn't bother updating the card's firmware, etc. That'd be PCs4everyone in Boston, FYI.) I had a Seagate PATA drive with barely a dozen hours on it that started clonking like crazy if you wrote data at high speed to it for too long (no, this was not the 7200.8, which had similar issues, relating to a motor driver circuit overheating. This was a 7200.9!) Seriously- the drive would completely stop writing data if you wrote to it continuously for about 40-50GB. The only thing that let me successfully complete the imaging was a borrowed fan directly cooling the drive.
I'm not too optimistic that Maxtor and Seagate will benefit each other in terms of technology the end user will care about; what is more likely is that Seagate will go enterprise, and Maxtor will go consumer, since that is what each brand is best known for.
Please help metamoderate.
No they're not really. As a recording engineer and programmer HD noise is a concern of mine. My system has 4x Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 and they really are quiet. I've used Barracudas for about 5 years now and this choice was based on HD noise figures from that time. 5 years ago the Barracudas were the quietist thing on the market and beat the competition hands down. Seems like now all the brands are pretty good - actually I'm pleasantly suprised how much improvement there's been judging by the figures. An increase of 3dB is not very much under load and nothing to get upset about. Some of my older drives would probably come in at 60-65dBA which was too loud. My PSU fan has to be the main culprit in any acoustic noise generated nowadays. As for the linked noise centre guides, these are the standard examples given everytime I've seen and there's no way the Barracuda 7200.9 is the same level as a normal conversation. To get this figure they probably average in all the normal silence of speech too I would guess. The band 50-60dBA is actually quite large in terms of SPL - every 6dB gain represents a doubling in power, every 12dB a quadrupling, so it's quite a big range.
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
Besides price per Gig, my next main concern is, "How long will it last?". Throughput speed and power consumption are important but long life usually beats those criteria. Warranties don't mean much when your data gets hosed from a drive's early death. A five year design life is a nice thing to have but I'd be a bit more comfortable if their warranty extended for that duration.
I've had mixed reliability results from both Seagate and Maxtor. Hopefully this union will take the best from both and result in new drives that regularly surpass the five year design.
Most people generally post when things go wrong or bad; very few seem to post when there is nothing wrong. You get a DOA drive, you're gonna bitch about it because it can't use it. I fit right there as well. I got a WD RE2 drive from newegg for my tivo S3 and it is working like a champ. It's quiet, fast and gives me 60+ hr of HD recording time. But did I post a positive review at newegg?...nope, I didn't. I was too busy using my new toy.
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
Actually, Storage Review is dying. It's only had two individual reviews this calendar year, plus one 'roundup' and one 'recap' review (as opposed to 12 reviews last year, and down from 56! in 2001.) I'm a big SR fan (at least, I used to be,) but it seems to have gone from a business to a hobby for the creator. You just can't rely on SR to provide timely reviews any more.
As for the notion that they have already reviewed all of these drives? They haven't. Not even in the 'roundup' review.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
So far, I'm not too impressed with SATA drives at all.
Of the four I've bought in the last year and a half, two have failed. I've already replaced one and need to send the other back for a warranty replacement.
Failure seem high on those SATA drives that other people I know have, too.
Maxtor drives are not reliable and I just wouldn't use them. Maybe this is why they have such detailed SMART stats? I don't know but just don't touch them. Great example of false economy as your story shows.
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
I don't see any drives with the retail Vista on them. With the advent of static RAM, you would think that they would think about those.
Does anyone have detailed stats of the new Microsoft operating system?
liqbase
I wonder about this, anyone want to chip in with some unscientific anecdotes?
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
They all qualify as "noisy". To approach "Silent", the noise measurement needs to be on the order of -27dBA.
Granted, they are being measured without a case, and closer than the 1 meter that is conventional for such things. And I could accept that all drives are within this range of noise. But it still stinks for making audio equipment that can be used in the same space as a sensitive microphone.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
My experience with Maxtor has taught me one valuable lesson: don't use Maxtor. I don't have any anecdotal evidence of drive quality getting worse; Maxtors shit out and develop bad sectors as long as I've known.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Ok, I'll Bite.
:p
Over 400 g5's deployed at my site over the last 2 years, all with SATA drives. There has been only one drive failure so far,
and it was premature so it was probably a bad unit or the movers roughed up his computer when he changed
offices, because it coincided with that event. We had a bunch of the last edition of the grey g4's with maxtor
hard drives that all seemed to fail within a few months of each other a 3 years back. We also
had a run of bad Maxtors in a batch of small form factor Dell desktops. We lost about 10 in one month.
Hooray for 3 year service plans !
the "Super"drives are dropping like flies though...I keep a stock of replacements in the closet. Good thing
a replacement with dual layer and lightscribe is around 60 bucks these days.
This is all highly subjective and anecdotal and not meant to slander maxtor in any way
music lover since 1969
Where are the 10K RPM SATA hard drives?
As of a year ago, Western Digital was the only one in the market. We need more competition for this so we can get cheap fast hard drives. SCSI is too expensive.
Remember FLASH drives degrade with repeated use. Ok for a digital camera - you can only take photos so fast. But for your important data? NAH! Ok. Upto 30,000 time seems ok, but run FILEMON (sysinternals.com) and you'll be blown away how frequently Windoze writes to your hard drive. All those silly background agents that many programs insist on installing (usually in the tray too) sit there and write to your HDD every 15 seconds.
I'll take a reliable mechanical drive over a FLASH drive, thanks.
(PS. Thanks for choosing this Story. HDDs are important to geeks!!!!! Most important part of their PC really!!!!)
I've never had a problem with my 160GB 7200.9 Barracuda (SATA). But it's also sitting right on top of two exhaust fans (which exhaust directly out of the computer) and has never gotten over 25 degrees celcius. If you're wondering, the case is an Antec Overture II. The drive has a jumper that when closed limits the drive speed to 150mb/s, and when open lets it fly at 300mb/s. I've got it open, but my motherboard doesn't support the 300mb/s SATA. That could also be a contributing factor to the device's track record.
I have a feeling that aside from drives that are dead out of the box, the huge majority of problems that people are experiencing are a combonation of crappy drivers/firmware, and crappy heat management.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
know what you mean about Maxtors - I find them dreadful. Good what you say about SATAs.
As for the superdrives, they too in my experience seem to go wrong within 12-18months, generally on the burning side. As you say thank God they're cheap now and they're easy to get at.
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
They still can't make drives big enough for vista, so I wouldn't worry just yet :p
When the posters fear their moderators, there is tyranny; when the moderators fears the posters, there is liberty.
That 25 for the Barracude is so cool. My ATA version same drive is currently running at 43C in a fully loaded dual G4 MDD. I've always thought that was a little high but I've never had any problems with them though. The drives have practically no cooling in the G4 case which is a shame.
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
what matters most (at least to me) is warranty and turnaround. At one time I went on a bit of a buying spree after losing a good bit of my6 data yet again to a single drive failure. In the lsat decade I've had two 80gb maxtors, four 160gb maxtor plus 9's, two 250gb plus nines, a seagate 80gb drive (which i sold right off because it was so damn loud) and a seagate 160. Of these, all but four (two 160gb maxtor satas, which i just put into service in the last month, and the two 250gb pata maxtors) have been back at least once for refurbishing.
What truly amazes me is how many people seem to bu white box drives cuz they're twenty bucks cheaper. Hard drives fail, and often, and that extra twenty bucks is like a two-for-one, or even three for one, sale.
BTW, seagate's warranty response was nothing compared to maxtor's - it wasn't even close, maxtor was so much better to deal with. I've not had to replace one since the merger, and after the experience with my 160gb seagate (which lasted all of 3 months when i first got it) I am not looking forward to the next time.
Who else comes with a 5 year warranty standard, on almost all drives?
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
This has been bugging me for a long time now. I have googled the question a lot of different ways and not come back with any clear benchmarks. Is someone knows a link, please post it. If not, any slashdotter with access to a proper test lab and drives could generate the info.
My Hypotheses is simple:
1. What really matters for a RAID implementation is Reliability, Size, cost and Speed. In that order.
2. SATA drives come close to SCSI drives in individual performance. Greater data densities help and lower spin rates hurt.
3. So how dose a 7 disk RAID 5 arrays comprised of 300 GB SCSI drives compare to one made up of 500 GB or 750 GB SATA drives ?
Comparisons should be based on High traffic storage intensive applications. Is there still a justification for the price premium on SCSI hard drives or is it now down to tradition?
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
I believe this has to do with the much weightier (relative to single-purpose devices) laser head arrangement that has the different types of lasers for each standard.
It also has to do with what you use the drive for. Eg: a drive that only ever reads or writes whole discs will last a lot longer than one constantly being used for random accesses.
These new hard drives run pretty hot. I wonder why they did not post a temperature comparison...
When shopping for an additional drive for my linux box a couple of months ago I went with a Barracuda 7200.9 because of its low noise and low power consumption. At the time I was comparing the .9 with the .10 and found that the .10 had a 30-40% higher power consumption at the same capacity.
I'm still amazed that the newer drive consumes much more power (and runs hotter in consequence) with not much benefits at the same capacity.
Markus
I had a similar situation but I really think it was because the drives were not rated to operate in an oven - which is what a badly designed case with 16 drives ended up as. That said it appears I've lost two Seagate SATA drives from a newer machine in the last two days, both halves of a mirror. I'm happy I fed it a new drive yesterday or I'd be looking at a long restore process.
I definitely think Maxtor gets bad batches as opposed to bad drives in general. I bought five 80Gb DiamondMax9 drives a couple of years ago and all failed within about a month, after moderate use for a year. I only bothered getting one replaced under warranty, and I'm still using that replacement today.
I don't think I'll ever go back to Maxtor, I think a lot of their problem was they were ATA133 not 100 like Seagate, the key to using Maxtors seems to be using them externally - I guess USB2/1394 doesn't push them too hard.
I've just got an Email from my web host, the Maxtor SCSI on my server is about to fail....
I've had one WD2000JS fail on me out of half a dozen 2500KS/2000JS drives I've bought in the last 2 years, so far SATA seems more reliable than IDE to me, I really don't care about performance.
I've had no problems with half a dozen 80Gb Seagate 7200.9 IDE's I've bought lately - typical the one with the best warranty has no problems!
#include <sig.h>
... well the part I'm interested in anyway.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I concur. At work we had a few Acer P4s with them in, all the same vintage. One day, a Maxtor in one of them started failing, and I swapped it out. Two others failed in the next month. I didn't give a fourth one the chance. I think they lasted three years.
Those of us that do a lot of high-speed, high-volume data collection -- and who are stuck with SCSI -- want to know:
Where are the 15000 RPM SATA hard drives? 10K is too slow.
In the course of every project, it will become necessary to shoot the scientists and begin production.
In my experience, Maxtor drives are as reliable if not more reliable than other makes, and I wouldnt buy anything else (especially given the 4 or 5 year warranties that maxtor drives seem to have).
Maxtor will advance me a new drive. Seagate will not. My important data is backed up. Therefore I buy Maxtors.
You realize that SATA *is* IDE, right? Just what part of the connector type do you think is responsible for all these new hard drive issues?
47 seconds to boot up was the best?
Our SATAs, our dual cores, our GB of DDR2, our PCI-E and it still takes almost a minute to boot up Windows.
No wonder I dont want to upgrade, progress isn't making things any faster.
If this were really happening, what would you think?
Along with poor packaging by vendors and poor handling by couriers.
Luckily, all the vendors I've used recently have boxed each drive in a wrap-around foam cage, in an individual box. I've heard horror stories of vendors shipping drives in the anti-static bag, with a handful of 'peanuts' in a large box, or worse, though!
The G5 HDDs are SATA. The actual optical drives in G5s are standard PATA IDE and can take most writers (I 'upgraded' mine from a Pioneer a104 to modded firmware 109 - now it can write DVD-RAM, Dual Layer DVDs and is RPC-0 - nice and cheap, and utterly reliable too. Can't fault that modded firmware.)
btw - recognise your name from your newsletters - I really love the newsletters you guys send out ^_^
Baka Drew
Well add one more to the "Excellent" pile as I did my civic duty and submitted a glowing review since the product is working as advertised for me. As for some of the other failures, not all seem to be the fault of the drive:
"...I wrote the previous review about 1/3 drives failing after two weeks of use. Turns out it was due to a low-quality power splitter that caused the drive to go up and down enough times for the RAID controller to mark it as FAILED. I used the extended test (about 2 hours) with WD's tools to verify that the drive was indeed in perfect condition, and now the RAID array is rebuilding. So I still have never had a WD (8 drives) or Seagate (5 drives) drive fail over the past 5 years. Wouldn't buy any other brand at this point...."
Again, use the reviews as a guide, but realize that many people are building things as cheaply as they can and perhaps it is some other factor as in the case above. If my WD craps out on me after a month or even a year, I'll gladly change my review, but seems odd (to me at least) that mostly newegg buyers are having any problems wit this drive.
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
Seagate sells 750G HDs with a 5 yr warrantee for $350 or so. I have 1. And 2 500s. And a 400. Anyway .... Why bother with Maxtor and their tiny warrantee? They have no confidence in their own product!
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
This is kinda like McDonalds buying Hardees to make their burgers taste better. The 2 most replaced drives due to hw failure imho are Maxtor and Seagate. One more reason for me to stick with Western Digital.
"If your parents never had children, chances are you wonât either." -Dick Cavett
Bill Watkins, the CEO of Seagate, has been perfectly clear in all of his public speaking what his intentions with regard to Maxtor are.
The old Maxtor products are going away. Period. Seagate has no intention to ship these products any longer than they contractually have to.
The Maxtor brand on the other hand, may continue on for some time, but it will only be a label on Seagate products. Maxtor had greater brand equity among consumers than Seagate does, and there is no reason to throw away that brand recognition.
Anybody here saying things that imply that Maxtor is going to continue to operate within seagate as a seprate entity isn't paying attention. Watkins has publicly said he eventually plans to let 90% of Maxtor people go. Here is an example for desktop products in particular, which used to be designed by Maxtor in Colorado. Seagate has already let go 640 of the 850 people who used to work at that site and the building is effectively gutted.
Maybe because there hasn't been much news on the drive front this year? The Seagate 750GBs have been out for a while and there's very few new drives out, even in the laptop market (I can think of 2 drives that now use PR tech). Everything else is pretty much the same as it was last year.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
The original statement is correct -- for power as was stated. SPL is NOT power, and is dependant upon both the output power of the signal source and the sensitivity of the speaker. Output power in dB for amplifiers is 20log (new power/original power), so a 6dB increase in POWER is a x2 increase. (20log2=6.02)
If it's 43C under load, you're doing okay. But if it's 43C idle and even higher under load, you're starting to flirt with the 50C+ danger zone. Heck, it's probably better to have a drive that is always 43C then one that goes from 30C to 45C constantly.
I have 2 drives at work (Raptors) that are 30C idle and 32C loaded, but they're in a bay cooler with a 80mm fan that pulls in from the outside and blows directly across the drive. Reckon those drives will last for quite a few years...
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
I've been using a SATA drive for about 2 weeks and I've found it to be very reliable. This thing is just awesome! I'm considering deploying SATA across all 2 of my computers (I run lunix on one of them).
:%s:work:/.:g
Very interesting. My experience is that keeping drives cool makes them last longer.
Except, Storage Review hasn't even reviewed the Seagate 750 GB drive. I think once the number of reviews started falling, companies stopped sending SR samples for free before release (seeing it as a more limited-audience site,) so SR has been purchasing drives; which, since its ad revenue is falling, it can't afford to keep doing.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
I've done RMA's w/ Seagate drives. There was an option to have them ship the replacement drive first--you just had to give a credit card number as collateral.