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