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."

Comments

Well, at least you know...

[jd]

...why they named it AAK!

iis kdawson's spell-check firmware broken?

[garcia]

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? :)

Re:iis kdawson's spell-check firmware broken?

[ruiner13]

Perhaps kdawson loves windows and IIS so much that he added it to his dictionary? ;)

The Day the Earth Stood Still

[Anonymous Coward]

Whatever you do, don't stream audio from one of the -K drives across Vista!

Re:drive failure

[Gandalf_the_Beardy]

That's why we have a hot standby datacentre with real time replication to it. Shame that one of our contractors reversed over the gas main and we evacuated leaving all the access cards to the hot standby in the evacuated building.....

Re:why do girls always abandon me?

[Lars T.]

Because you have a harddrive but no firmware.

Big Red Button

[Jeff Carr]

If there is no such item a good BOFH will create such red button. One of the data centers I worked at had just such a red button. It was designed to immediately kill all power to the room. Behind a plastic case, clearly marked "Emergency Shutoff".

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.

Perpendicular Recording Overview Video

[Jaxoreth]

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.