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

bug

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Reliability

[PlusFiveInsightful]

I'll take reliability over performance of a hard drive any day. Nothing sucks more than swapping out drives.

Re:Reliability

[rcw-work]

Compared to just replacing the hard drive for $150. Hardware is cheap. Labor is not.

Your example makes sense, but what if you've already done that? Say your app is SQL-based and does some queries that are O(n^2) complex. You've already spent $20k on a bad-ass server with RAID10, a bunch of spindles, separate transaction log drives, and as much RAM as can fit. Now, a year later, there's more records in the system and performance sucks again. Where do you go from there? These disks don't go to 11. If you want to double the performance of that $20k box, you're likely going to spend not $40k but $200k.

Once you outgrow commodity parts, if you want a 2x speedup, you'll usually have to pay 10x for it. Or wait three years. The price/performance curve is deceptively shallow towards the bottom end.

Not really same drives

[zdzichu]

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.

Re:Not really same drives

[DAldredge]

Two drives sold under identical make and model identifiers should not be that different.

Re:RAID1

[GooberToo]

as pretty much all mobos these days have RAID1 capability built into the chipset's SATA controller anyway.

And many of those are actually slower than a pure, software-only, RAID solution. Sometimes the "hardware RAID" does nothing but offload checksum calculations or other bits onto slower hardware resulting it in being a major performance hinderence rather than a performance boost. Worse yet, if your controller card dies, ALL of your data is now inaccessible. Worse yet again, there is not guarantee future hardware releases, even by the same manufacturer, will be compatible. Heck some of the really low end hardware solutions don't even provide mirrored reads, which should provide a 2x read-only performance boost.

Not all RAID is created equal. And for many, software RAID, especially for Linux users, provides a solution faster than many RAID hardware solutions, is future proof, and only costs a couple of precent in additional CPU load. Best of all, it's free and works well with LVM. In a day and age where multiple cores are common and few actually use more than one, this option doesn't have much of a downside until you're willing to look at *REAL* RAID hardware.