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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."
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.