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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.
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