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Seagate Firmware Performance Differences
Derkjan de Haan writes "The Seagate 7200.10 disk was the first generally available desktop drive featuring perpendicular recording for increased data density. This made higher-capacity disks with excellent performance cheaper to produce. Their sequential throughput actually exceeded that of the performance king — the Western Digital Raptor, which runs at 10,000 RPM vs. the more common 7,200 RPM. But reports began to surface on the Net claiming that some 7200.10 disks had much lower performance than other, seemingly identical disks. Attention soon focused on the firmware, designated AAK, in the lower-performing disks. Units with other firmware, AAE or AAC, performed as expected. Careful benchmarks showed very mixed results. The claims found on the Net, however, have been confirmed: the AAK disk does have a much lower throughput rate than the AAE disk. While firmware can tune various aspects of performance it is highly unusual for it to affect sequential throughput. This number is pretty much a 'fact' of the disk, and should not be affected by different firmware."
When the performance of a lower-end drive is better than that of a higher-end (or, god forbid, a SCSI drive!) this is a serious bug that of course needs to be fixed in the firmware update.
I'll take reliability over performance of a hard drive any day. Nothing sucks more than swapping out drives.
Is there a tool to check what firmware my hard drive has in Linux? I've got one of these Seagates, and it's SATA, so that means hdparm can't talk to it.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Looks like Seagate designed the new drives for servers (probably file servers) because they're really good a moving large chunks of data around, doing large reads, and large write, but not so good a a ton of little reads and writes. So, don't buy them for your desktop/workstation.
- I voted for Nintendo and against Bush
...why they named it AAK!
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Looking at the graphs on the first page of the article, it seems like the AAK firmware has some kind of performance cap on it. When you get to ~80 on the horizonal scale, the curves between the two graphs appear to sync up again.
So does this mean they they've put some kind of speed governor on their hard drives, or am I totally misinterpreting the results?
Disks are cheap. I *always* run a RAID1 mirrored pair in my PCs, as pretty much all mobos these days have RAID1 capability built into the chipset's SATA controller anyway.
On my main machine at home, I always buy my disks in groups of three drives whenever I upgrade. Two drives stay in the machine as the mirrored pair, and once a month I pull one out and stash it in a safety deposit box at my bank, and put the third drive into the machine and re-sync the mirror. That way if my house burns down / tornado smashes it or whatever bad thing that might happen, I've got a drive with my machine's image on it, no older than one month, stashed away offsite in a secure place so I can recover most all my stuff to a new machine.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAoh wait that's not funny at all please shut the fuck up
From TFA page 6:
A sad detail is that updating an AAK disk to other firmware is impossible, due to physical differences of the two disks.
(emph. mine)
Different disks have different performance. News at 11.
:wq
This number iis pretty much a 'fact' of the disk, and should not be affected by different firmware.
:)
Poor spell checking is pretty much a 'fact' of the browser you use when you submit articles to Slashdot, and should be affected by different editors.
Perhaps kdawson's firmware is broken?
Is it possible that we can blame Windows Vista for this (DRM!!!!) ?
Whatever you do, don't stream audio from one of the -K drives across Vista!
And they are SRIPE0 and I am definitely smokin with file stuff.
I am juggling 14 GByte pdf with a breeze (albeit acrobat reader doesn't seem to work with files larger than 4 GByte)
<voice type="fatherly">since you even posted this to slashdot I have a hint for you:</voice>
<voice mode="whispering">s-l-a-s-h-d-o-t</voice>
That is hogwash. According to wikipedia it has been on the market for 2 years now in various forms. Searching newegg there are many drives from a few brands that have it already, and I know I've seen them on there for at least a year.
today is spelling optional day.
It's interesting to note that the general purpose benchmarks come out with AAK in the lead while the others, all very much sequential read focussed, don't. So the question is, what exactly are the operations that the AAK is doing faster in the mixed benchmarks? Seeking? Or maybe it's a bus bandwidth limit at the hard drive end?
Sadly, we can't tell, because the author has focussed on the sensationalism of poor performance rather than asking these questions. Seems to need a few more experiments setting up, or alternatively an answer from the horse's mouth.
Some candidate theories:
- microcontroller software bug (unlikely)
- hardware cost-down such as a slower, cheaper microcontroller or less RAM on the drive (quite likely)
- rebalancing the performance optimisation, changing the cacheing or readahead algorithms to suit typical loads (possible, but it seems odd that this would limit linear read performance)
I have been setting up a couple of 8-drive RAID-5 arrays with these drives for some customers, and I also found out that 3.AAE drives performed much better that 3.AAK. No idea why. Seagate was unresponsive to queries about flashing the firmware and I had to replace all the 3.AAK drives by 3.AAEs.
The manufacturing country had nothing to do with it. I had some chinese 3.AAE and 3.AAK as well as taiwanese (or was that thai?) 3.AAE and 3.AAK. 3.AAE would always perform better.
The kind of testing I performed was:
Also, if you buy a retail kit (which I found cheaper than OEM at Fry's), there is no way to find out the firmware level on the box. You had to open the retail boxes to check the firmware revision on the drive itself.
One theory I have is that these drives can supposedly be configured for server or workstation workloads. It could be that AAK drives are configured for server workloads by default (unless overridden) while the AAE are configured for workstation workloads by default. I have no idea how to toggle this under Linux.
The implication is that Seagate has crippled their 7200rpm drives so as not to cannibalize sales of the 10k RPM drives. Assuming this is true, it shouldn't remain so for very long. There are plenty of other purveyors of 7200rpm drives (without an interest in selling more 10K RPM SATA drives), and Seagate doesn't hold exclusive rights to perpendicular recording technology. Soon enough someone will make a 7200rpm drive that isn't crippled, and then I suspect we'll see the 7200.10 series magically return to its former sequential performance.
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
absolutely no dollars.
Impeach Bush with a criminal indictment FP.
If Kim Jong iL did this, he would be accused of war-mongering. When Front Man For The Crime Syndicate Does It, it's called a warning.
Blow it out your ass, F.O.X.
F.O.X. : F(ear) O(ppression and) X(enophobia)
Regardz,
Kilgore Trout
Speculating is fun, so I will. Many physical devices that require exacting manufacturing processes are sold under different models of varying specs. The devices with the least manufacturing defects are the high-end, expensive models, while those with more defects are sold for less. The best example is CPUs, the difference between speeds being the amount of manufacturing defects. So perhaps with these drives they have to use different firmware depending on the quality of the platter, and for marketing they took a simpler route and sell them all under the same model with lowest-common-denominator specs.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
Quite why people suddenly think that drives are going to fail catastrophically at the same time like this is be
An experienced administrator would know there is one item in the data center everything is relying on no-one could ever think of it failing, and it will fail at the most catastrophic time you think of. It won't be all fo those 1000'thns drives failing at the same time because some plane mistook your server lights for the landing runway, It will be some cheap sprinkler, the security lock of the door, Or some manager that decides to shutdown a machine to protect it from a Denial of service attack.
If there is no such item a good BOFH will create such red button.
I had a Samsung 250 GB HM250JI 2.5" SATA on order, in Europe it's less than 150 Euro and that is a bargain for a 250 Gig laptop drive. The problem was that a little googling showed massive performance problems with some drives. Some had miserable speed benchmarks, others (in OS X) failed to mount or mounted sporadically. Others performed just fine.
Turned out Samsung had a couple of different firmware versions on shipping drives, and it is possible to burn new firmware to a CD and boot from it under OS X to flash the drive with updated firmware. But after reading about these and other problems with Samsung drives I cancelled the order and bought a WD instead. Pity Seagate don't have any affordable similar drives, I've only ever used seagate before and I think they're pretty fantastic.
Because you're a smelly GNU hippy with a small penis.
Because you have a harddrive but no firmware.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Does anyone know which actual line of HDD's this firmware difference is being found in? Seagate offer 2 different types of drives - AS and NS specification for the same product, where the only real difference AFAIK is that the NS class is rated for 24/7 operation.
yup, about a decade ago I worked somewhere where this was an issue - they had a RAID configuration of somekind (I'm a nerd, but not a hardware one) and they had bearing failures in sufficiently close succession that the third failure occurred before all of the swapping from the second failure hadn't been completed.
supposedly it was traced to a common fault in the bearings
I've probably seen this a hundred times before, literally. Sometimes there are firmware bugs in drives. What an amazing mystery!
It's almost as if the author had never before imagined such a mundane thing. Next story...
The Seagate? Have you considered that "AAK" implies that there many have been as many as 11 previous revisions of this drive?
Clear, Dark Skies
I've just tested my 7200.10 320GB 3.AAK drive using hdparm -t /dev/sda1, and it gives me 71.77MB/s read rate. Isn't this about the same as one of the 3.AAE drives tested above?
just wonder why there are so many anonymous cowards in this world....
...except you screw it up badly enough.
perhaps most women are only attracted to good spellers? (explanation)
you could read the archives of xkcd and cry our little heart out,
or what you need is some ghetto booty
Also, if you're concerned about Linux block device performance, look at the various kernel tunables. On a single drive, such as those Seagates, I can get extra ~10MB/s. On RAIDs and LVM volumes, the differences can be much higher-- more than twice as fast, in some cases. There are a few parameters that make a difference, and many values you might want to try for each. I have a script iterate through the various permutations, running IOZone on each, so I can see what does best for read vs. write and large vs. small file performance. But I can't release it just yet (employer makes 100% of income from Open Source; employer hates Open Source). Anyway, somebody out there can do better than I, I'm sure :)
This discusses the tunables you'd want to check: http://www.3ware.com/KB/article.aspx?id=11050
Note that these do NOT apply only to 3Ware controllers. And the differences in performance can be massive.
I get sick of replacing drives, as they inevitably fail. I get even MORE sick of PAYING to do so.
Around the time Maxtor and Western Digital dropped their warranties from 2yrs to 1yr (or was it 3 to 2?), Seagate increased their warranty to FIVE years . In terms of guaranteed gigabytes per year, Seagate is clearly the best buy. The book is completely closed in my mind, with no need to reconsider. Guaranteed drives for 5 years. Meanwhile, with another brand, you may have to buy the same drive 3 times during that period. Screw that.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
The security for the door was malfunctioning earlier this summer, and the alarm was going off. The security guard thought the button was a shutoff switch for the security system... Luckily we had redundant servers at another location... Of course half of those didn't work...
Luckily also, this was the smaller data center at that site, so it only housed a few hundred servers... including the servers that ran many of our ATMs, and our server inventory and trouble tracking software... which didn't fail over to their backups... of course.
In addition, we had no idea where the server housing our server inventory information was... It turns out it was housed on a server called Skywalker... which we couldn't find... It turned out to be a cluster of Anakin and Amidala...
Fracking geeks.
The television will not be revolutionized.
For those who are unclear on what perpendicular recording is, Hitachi made a video explaining how it works. It's a bit dry and technical, but I figure the Slashdot crowd is savvy enough to grok it.
In general, it is safe and legal to kill your children. -- POSIX Programmer's Guide
I've seen the same behaviour from IBM SCSI drives, exactly identical models of drive, one meant for RS6000 servers and the other for desktop PCs, exhibited very different behaviour, with the RS6000's massively outperforming the PC models. We used to rip the server drives out of (surplussed) servers, dd the PC drive's contents onto them, and use them to replace the PC drives, for a significant increase in performance.
(This was with older drives, obviously, since (a) IBM don't make drives any more and (b) we wouldn't have been allowed to rip drives out of new servers).
I am an insider in the drive industry, so while I need to be vague on some things, I can add clarification on others.
A hard drive is a very complex subsystem inside your computer, more complex than many people realize. A hard drive contains one or more CPUs, memory, firmware, and dedicated hardware devoted to the functions of storing and retrieving data.
There is no single "right" way to draw the line between what is firmware and what is hardware in a hard drive. Algorithms could be coded in VHDL or Verilog and synthesized into the silicon, or they could be compiled in C (or hand coded in assembly) and be embedded in firmware. Each drive company has their own philosophy for where to draw the line.
Some drive companies choose to implement only fundamental functions in silicon, and implement everything else in firmware. For these companies, comparing their firmware to the BIOS in a PC is a poor analogy. A better analogy would be to compare the firmware to the operating system.
In a system with "lite" firmware, the firmware typically would be responsible for configuring a few control registers and buffers, and then the hardware would take over. But for a system with "heavy" firmware, the firmware behaves much more like a kernel. Data is not going to be moved in or out of buffers, or be sent to and from platters, without the active involvement of the firmware scheduling and ordering that activity.
The author of the OP wrote "it is highly unusual for (firmware) to affect sequential throughput". The author is wrong. In a system with "heavy" firmware, all performance is highly dependent on the firmware. It can easily make the same difference in performance as you would see running Windows 95 v. Windows XP v. Windows Vista v. RH 7.2 v. RHEL 3.0 on the same PC hardware.
I do not know if the Seagate drive in question is a "heavy" or "lite" firmware drive, but I do know that the assumption that firmware takes a minor role in hard drive performance is mistaken.
# hdparm -tT /dev/sda /dev/sda: /dev/sdb /dev/sdb: /dev/sdc /dev/sdc: /dev/sdd /dev/sdd: /dev/sda /dev/sdb /dev/sdc /dev/sdd
Timing cached reads: 1510 MB in 2.00 seconds = 754.95 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 220 MB in 3.02 seconds = 72.77 MB/sec
# hdparm -tT
Timing cached reads: 1436 MB in 2.00 seconds = 718.05 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 224 MB in 3.00 seconds = 74.57 MB/sec
# hdparm -tT
Timing cached reads: 1430 MB in 2.00 seconds = 715.17 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 194 MB in 3.02 seconds = 64.28 MB/sec
# hdparm -tT
Timing cached reads: 1488 MB in 2.00 seconds = 743.71 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 190 MB in 3.00 seconds = 63.30 MB/sec
# smartctl -d ata -i
Device Model: ST3320620AS
Firmware Version: 3.AAD
# smartctl -d ata -i
Device Model: ST3320620AS
Firmware Version: 3.AAD
# smartctl -d ata -i
Device Model: ST3320620AS
Firmware Version: 3.AAK
# smartctl -d ata -i
Device Model: ST3320620AS
Firmware Version: 3.AAK
Anyone know the performance of this particular firmware vs the other two?
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
The difference between these drives is not only the firmware, the hardware is also different. If you look a bottom of the drives, you can see the board has a completely different layout and presumably (the pictures I've seen were too low quality and the memory was not on the visible side on the AAK-drives) different chips. According to Seagate, the AAK drives were for an OEM-customer (unfortunately, they didn't mention which one). But how or why those drives made it to retail-channels (Seagate and the OEM-customer knowing the drives had a different performance profile)?
It only takes one man to change the Wisdom of the Crowd to Tyranny of the Masses.
There's been far far too many reports 'across the web' claiming the drives are either dead silent or noisy as hell.
This would concur with the news post here, I'd say it's the AAM (or is it AMM?) accoustic management stuff.
On top of this there's been more reports of faults than there was with the 7200.9's. (although nothing deathstar esque) If you go on the newegg.com feedback section for the varying 7200.10's you'll see a surprising variety of votes, yet newegg is traditionally filled with 'fanboy' responses - either wildly popular and one or two bad ones, or of course the opposite.
After doing my research and being a picky bastard with noise and performance, I decided to hang up my seagate loyalist hat without having ever owned a 7200.10, I've switched back to WD, the reviews are just as good, the noise is confirmed to be almost as quiet as a 'quiet seagate' but clearly not as bad as the noisy ones.
I will miss the 5 year warranty but I have a habit of always selling my disks within about 18 - > 30 months second hand and buying bigger ones anyhow, I like to keep disks with a long warranty in the house.
I may well switch back to seagate but I'm waiting for some decent bloody gigabytes per platter (188gb? please) where is the 250 and 333 (samsung, what's going on?) platters that should be out by now.
My experiences would indicate otherwise. Or at least they wouldn't be attracted to themselves.
Anyone can "stand up for what they believe", but it takes a very brave individual to change what they believe. - Loundry
IN all fairness, the 7200.10 designation is the same as saying it's an Ford F150. In this regards the 7200 indicates it's a 7200 RPM drive and not a 5400 RPM model. the .10 is the revision number and not a model number. The model number is actually "ST3320620AS" not the 7200.10. So anyone who's buying a seagate drive damn well better pay attention to the model number and explanation. Some are designed for servers and cost more while others are designed for multimedia apps (video editing) and then you have the general consumer models. Cheap and varying performance.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
It's been a while, but Seagate's model number naming convention used to be very consistent, and solid, based on a set of hard rules. The model number starts with an ST (to indicate Seagate), then a single digit indicating the form factor of the drive, followed by the UNFORMATTED capacity of the drive, and then A letter indicating interface type. I believe the insertion of the "N" in the model number originally meant "NOVELL", because some drives were specifically designed for 24/7 server operation.
In the early days of installing Netware, you had the option to run a program called COMPSURF (COMPrehensive SURFace analysis) that would scrub the disk for defects and map them out. It would take hours (sometimes days) to run, so that's why Seagate offered drives that were already compsurfed, to speed up the installation of the NOS.
Of course, back then, Novell was pretty much the only network operating system, so they used the N in the model number for Novell. Today, everybody makes operating systems, so it's easy to forget what the N means.
AN HERO. do it now faggot
DLink 530TX: Via Rhine chipset. 530TX+: Realtek 8139. Apparently the + sign meant "more sucky". After validating that one has worked well, and then ending up with the other, and not having it work well (it crippled a basement closet NFS server), I can get a little choked about these small distinctions for a very long time. Bought more expensive Intel fxp cards for a long time afterward.
Here's the thing. If I order a 530TX from my favorite rock-solid discount house, they will fill the order with a 530TX+ without even asking, because of the suggestion conveyed by the product name of "small highly-compatible improvement".
It's a flagrant violation of the social contract.
However, in the case of Seagate, I don't see the performance delta between these drives as being much to cry over. With the 8139 I was seeing a 50% packet loss on certain protocols. Wake me up when the AAK is reporting a 50% seek failure rate on selected workloads.
Look at the craziness. Seagate might be making these drives on two different continents, and obviously that could involve some significant differences in component supply chains. In some cases, it might turn out that the drives produced by one supply chain are a bit more jiggy than the other supply chain. For reasons no-one fully understands, the exact composition of the bearing lubricant and bearing steel reduce spindle vibration by 1% So you tune the BIOSes a little bit different to bring out the best in both production series. Both series meet the specified performance target. No animals were harmed. Yet the small performance profile difference incites a wave of entitlement lust throughout the page-view-for-pennies-fan-boy-wanker-cult, who quite blithely accept the presence of their cycle-stealing Realtek engineered-for-mediocrity embedded networking chip. You go, Realtek. The wanker boys have spotted a mouse.
I purchased one of these AAK (Thailand) drives the day before /. put the issue on my radar screen. After removing SATA-I jumper, I get this with Fedora Core 6:
/dev/sdb:
Timing buffered disk reads: 212 MB in 3.00 seconds = 70.60 MB/sec
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
I phoned Seagate's tech support number to ask about this. As soon as I started talking about firmware the 1st-level tech support guy escalates me without asking anything else. The 2nd-level guy does a bit of reading and seems to think this AAK firmware is an OEM firmware, and that Seagate isn't obliged to do anything for me at all. I'm told to contact the store I bought it from, as it is an OEM drive and the OEM is responsible for any support or replacement options, etc, etc. What a joke. He says the AAE firmware is the latest firmware for Seagate's retail drives, and was a bit confused at first that this drive had AAK firmware. He ends up talking to one of the head engineers real quick, and when he comes back he relays that apparently some OEM company dumped a whole wack of drives onto retailers. Seagate basically told me good luck, but we ain't gonna do squat for ya, sonny. Lovely.