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

Posted by kdawson on from the should-be-space-enough-for-anyone dept.

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."

6 of 283 comments (clear)

  1. But they didn't even do 1T right... by pseudorand · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Has anyone else noticed that a large number of the Seagate 1T drives fail on you in 30 days. The same is true for samsung and WD. Even with the Hitachis I get 1/5 failed out of the box. I still buy all Hitachis though, because the ones that do work keep working. Why are we moving to 1.5T when the 1T are too buggy to be useful. (BTW, my epxerience is based on buying 100+ drives).

    1. Re:But they didn't even do 1T right... by Taibhsear · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Check to see if it was from Thailand. Not that I have anything against the country (their food is delicious!) but the manufacturing plant there has been churning out sub-par drives in certain models. Check the newegg reviews on your specific drive.

      As far as this drive though, I recently got this exact drive (the 1.5TB). The write and read speeds, though not documented, seem right on par with my other sata drives (one is 300GB Maxtor with 32MB cache, the other is 320GB Seagate with 16MB cache. Both SATA with the limiter jumper removed.) I only use the 1.5TB drive (actual space is about 1.35TB) for media storage, formatted in NTFS but used mainly in Ubuntu 8.04. It, however, was from Thailand so I'm a little worried. I keep all the stuff I've backed up on it on other drives and plan to until a few months have passed the trial. Ran seagate tools and the drive passed all tests.

    2. Re:But they didn't even do 1T right... by greg1104 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      If you take a look at the newegg reviews, you'll find 16% of them give the 1TB 7200.11 drive a 1 star review, most of which are because of DOA or D shortly after A. So it's not just you who noticed.

      Seagate's Barracuda line had a good run with high reliability for quite a while. If you check the reliability database at storagereview (unfortunately you have to go through some trouble to become a member and see the data), the Barracuda ATA III, IV, and V are ranked near the top--92, 90, and 96th percentile respectively. Then things went way downhile--7200.7 hits 88, the 7200.8 at 49, and the 7200.9 at 43. That matches my own anecdotal experience.

      Sometime after the 750GB drives came out reliability took a further dive south. I believe that was caused by switching a large amount of production to a new plant in Thailand (the reliable models came out of Singapore). That seems to be the inevitable way hard drive manufacturing works--whenever some company moves to a new facility, quality dives for a few years afterward. I predict that 5 or 10 years from now talk will be about how reliable the old Thai drives were compared to the new junk coming out of [new country of origin].

    3. Re:But they didn't even do 1T right... by greg1104 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The data from Google's study say that lowering drive temperatures to below 35C increases their failure rate, particularly when they're new. I'm not sure I agree with the entirety of their methodology, but it's certainly persuasive enough that I've switched to aiming for 35-40C rather than sub-30C. That normally means the same basic approach you outlined, putting a single large and slow fan in front of the drives, but with some way to slow it down even further than the defaults if necessary. I don't hesitate like I used to in mounting drives in adjacent bays either.

      I suspect the true cause of the correlation you suggest (drives >750GB fail more often) is mainly due to the switch to the perpendicular recording methods that started in larger capacity drive around that same time.

  2. Re:Capacity is hardly news anymore by Pentium100 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I have a very old Seagate drive (well, it says Seagate ST41200N on the top, but windows recognizes it as Imprimis 94601-15). It is a 1.2GB (991MB) 5.25" full height drive and it works perfectly. I have another one, a bit younger (ST34520N) ~4GB, it also works very well. All the new ones also work well, so when I buy a hard drive, I buy Seagate.

    I wonder why nobody is making 5.25" hard drives anymore... With current technology they could have at least 10TB capacity...

  3. Terabyte Tebibyte? by AliasMarlowe · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Please don't say that word. It sounds like something my 3 month old niece says. Rather, call it Decimal/fake terabyte (found on hard drives) or just a (real) 'terabyte'. I think it's pathetic people have come up with some new (baby sounding) word because hard drive manufacturers are too f'ing arrogant to make 'true' sizes. In marketing 1TB/1000GB sounds a little bit better than 931GB..

    Please don't abuse the word Terabyte, or attempt to usurp any of the other base-10 prefixes which were defined long before computers were invented. It is the base-2 interpretation of these prefixes which is fake.

    The abuse started with use of kilo to denote 2^10 instead of 10^3, often using K instead of k as prefix. This was relatively innocuous, since the case of the letter could ensure the prefixes were somewhat distinct. However, for 10^6, the prefix for mega is M (and m is also allocated for milli), and abusing this prefix to mean 2^20 is unconscionable.

    The kibi, mebi, gibi, etc. prefixes were created to solve a real need. The base-10 prefixes were already assigned, and could not be usurped.

    --
    Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire