An In-Depth Look At Seagate's 1.5TB Barracuda

theraindog writes "More than a year and a half after the first terabyte hard drives became widely available, Seagate has reached the next storage capacity milestone. With 1.5 terabytes, the latest Barracuda 7200.11 serves up 50% more capacity than its peers, and at a surprisingly affordable $0.12 per gigabyte. But Seagate's decision to drop new platters into an old Barracuda shell may not have been a wise one. The Tech Report's in-depth review of the world's first 1.5TB hard drive shows that while the latest 'cuda is screaming fast in synthetic throughput drag races, poor real world write speeds ultimately tarnish its appeal."

Comments

Write speed

[qoncept]

How important is throughput? I'd be interested in knowing what percentage of these drives are going in external enclosures. For the time being, 1.5tb is much larger than you'd need to be running any applications off of and I'd guess the majority of these drives are going to be storing movies, mp3s and photos, where the speed hardly matters at all.

Re:Write speed

[qoncept]

My point was I want to know how often the hard drive is going to be the bottleneck instead rather than USB or firewire, where all of them would perform (even more so than they already do) virtually identically.

That aside, this drive actually performed near the top in most of the tests and middle of the pack in most of the others, so the author talking bad about its performance was pretty unfounded. And I didn't see anything in any of the tests that would make me choose from the drives tested on anything other than cost and capacity. The truth is, in the "real world" everyone is clammering to compare the drives in, you'd never have a clue which drive was in your computer unless you opened up the case and looked.

Re:Write speed

[Znork]

How important is throughput?

For what I'll use them for? Not very. Looks like they've got great stats for bulk storage, and any more demanding segments I can stripe and/or cache anyway (with memory prices where they are, it's not like you hit swap anymore).

Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience. Lack of capacity, not quite so easily. So several of these are definitely on the shopping list. (Mmm, mythtv storage...)

Re:Write speed

[mikael_j]

Because obviously any disk not used for your operating system or applications would be connected using USB or Firewire, couldn't be that some people actually connect their SATA drives directly to the SATA bus in their computers, right?

/Mikael

Re:Write speed

[Walpurgiss]

I have 7 of the WD 5400-7200RPM "GreenPower" 1TB HDs in a raid5 array that I access only through FTP and SMB.

I suppose 5400RPM is slow in terms of transfer and seek time, and being a software RAID5 set managed in software via mdadm likely also reduces the speed of the array. However none of that speed decrease is readily apparent due to the relative bottleneck of the 1GBPS ethernet connection.
I assume that drives of this size primarily would see similar use as the drives I use. Given the experience I've had, I agree that the speed of the drive probably doesn't matter so much. I doubt many people would use a 1.5TB drive for their OS or swap space, especially if speed mattered.
The speed people probably would be using some ultra wide scsi drives or some other speed oriented drive, perhaps the raptor line.

Re:Write speed

[Sancho]

No, he asked in his first post how many would be connected to a low-speed bus, and he clarified his point when someone else who couldn't read mentioned swap files. Here, I'll quote it for you:

I'd be interested in knowing what percentage of these drives are going in external enclosures. For the time being, 1.5tb is much larger than you'd need to be running any applications off of and I'd guess the majority of these drives are going to be storing movies, mp3s and photos, where the speed hardly matters at all.

http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1003109&cid=25457241

So if you weren't intentionally trolling, it definitely came off that way.

There's a bit of truth to what he says, too. Lots of people use drives this size for what is effectively long-term storage. They use it for their movie collections, their music, their HD TV shows, etc. Without that, in fact, the market for these drives would be really, really small--limited, if I were guessing, to people working with video. Write-performance will have a pretty big impact in that market, but just about anywhere else where this kind of massive storage is used, it's probably going to be negligible.

Re:Write speed

[mikey1134]

I would have to disagree. My company uses a RAID-5 for DB's and a RAID-1 for logs, we have yet to run into a performance barrier with this configuration. Mind you, a larger DB than ours (60GB) with more users than ours (100-500 connected users) might require a faster setup. But I wouldn't say that it's incompetent to place a DB on a RAID-5.

storage capacity boggles the mind

[jollyreaper]

Wow. My first hard drive was 20mb. I bought a keychain flash drive the other day with 16gb of storage. I can go on youtube and watch playthrough recordings of games that had me going ZOMGWTF!!! 15 years before that phrase was even coined. I remember being blown away by how incredibly awesome the newer Sierra adventure games were once they supported VGA graphics.

I remember how cool I thought it was when I could dub my dad's old sabbath records off onto a tape and bring my tunes with me on the go. It boggles the mind that I can fit dozens of albums on a single mp3 player. The Internet makes Asimov's concept of the Encyclopedia Galactica appear small and pathetic, we're seeing more and more scifi computer technology made real each and every day. Snow Crash, anyone? With how the economy's tanking, I expect burbclaves are just a few years off.

Makes me wonder what I'll be thinking given another ten years of progress, what will be boggling my mind then?

Re:An In-Depth Look At Seagate's 1.5TB Barracuda:

[noidentity]

That's because they use perpendicular recoding technology. Other drives with classic, lower-density recording look like this:

<>|--|--|--|<>|--|<>|<>|<>|--|--|<>|--|<>|<>|--|<>|--|--|<>|--|--|--|<>|<>|--|--|--|--|<>|<>|--|<>|<>|--|<>|<>|<>|<>|<>