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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."
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.
Whale
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How reliable is the thing?
Buy me one and I can promise status updates.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I've always had good luck with these drives. It's the only brand I'll buy and recommend to another person. The fact they will warranty their drives for 5 years where most others will only do 1 - 3 years says something about them. If they're betting their drives will last 5 years, who am i to argue?
I've had the same experience - Seagate has consistently outlasted every the drive brand I've seen. Based on past experiences, I'd rank them, from least reliable to most, as:
Hitachi
Western Digital
Maxtor
Samsung
Seagate
Drive brands not listed I either have no experience with or not enough to form an opinion.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Been a long time since I was in the business as a reseller, but we used to have more WDC failures then Seagate. But we'd get cases of both that had 20-30% of drives that were sealed from the factory, that were either DOA or had cascading bad sectors. But that was back in the days of absolute crap when everyone was in the size race.
Things change in 10 years, I do like the current brand of Samsung drives.
Om, nomnomnom...
Hey, everybody's thinking it, I'm just saying it. ;)
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. . . if lack of "real-world throughput" might have to do with other parts of the system which haven't yet caught up or been optimized for these huge new drives. E.g., OS, disk controller, etc. Just my .02.
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).
Ditto on this...Had really bad experiences with Hitachi and Western Digital. Swore by Maxtor for a while in the early-90's, and then a got several in a row that died within 2 years. Never used a samsung, but I've been sticking with seagate for about 15 years now, and they are incredibly reliable. testament to reliability: with only a little care and maintenance, I have now gone a whopping 12(!!!!) years with out losing a single byte of important data. The only problem for me actually is size...in 12 years without information loss, you really do accumulate a massive amount of data. Even with regularly cleaning out unneeded data and archiving stuff I don't need instant access to, I've managed to fill 2/3rds of my 1TB storage drive already.
"The GPL is viral by design, like any good religion."
When the first 1TB came out they were priced at around $400 if I remember right. This one is retailing for $200 or so. Thus its almost beating moore's law. Not that moore's law applied to hard-drives anyway.
More like a milestone-and-a-half.
I've managed to fill 2/3rds of my 1TB storage drive already.
Your wrist must be tired!
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?
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This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
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...
And it also looks better to write "200GB" on a LTO-1 tape and then add the fine print on the other side of the box (assuming 2:1 compression).
Can anyone explain to me how this "tradition" (of writing double capacity) came to be?
I have a few of these drives... they are very fast for sequential read (>120MB/s sustained)
However, if write-cache is enabled (default) Linux will freeze intermittently reporting a SATA timeout executing a cache-flush command.
Tested with the 2.6.24 and 2.6.26 kernels. Other people have reported the same problem with the 2.6.27 kernel.
Tested with multiple drives and multiple SATA controllers (different chipsets). No SMART errors logged.
Thread on the Seagate support forum: http://forums.seagate.com/stx/board/message?board.id=ata_drives&thread.id=2390
The workaround is to disable write-cache on the drive.
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
SI prefixed only have standardized meanings when used with SI base units. The byte is not an SI base unit. Actually, there is no official SI base unit for information, but if there were one it would most likely be the bit, which is already associated with base-10 SI prefixes. Mixed units (e.g. MB/s) vary depending on how the value is calculated, but are generally SI.
kilobits, megabits, terabits: SI prefixes
kilobytes, megabytes, terabytes: binary prefixes
The HDD manufacturers want to use real SI units they should say "12Tb" rather than redefining "1.5TB".
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
You think Seagate is the only company to offer consumer hard drives with a 5 year warranty?
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=488&language=en
It's not that hard to find 5 year warranty mentioned on the WDC website.
Black = WD6401AALS 5 year warranty
Blue = WD6400AAKS 3 year warranty
Green = WD6400AACS 3 year warranty
And to add to the fun the Black has twice the cache and is only about $10 more than the Blue at 640GB.
Seagate is by no means a bad company but they aren't the only game in town.
...but they are advertising this drive as 1.5TB when it's actiually 1500TB. That's 36GB missing.
I am sick of this stupid fucking argument. A 1.5TB drive storing 1,500,000,000,000 bytes is a lot more sensible than a 1.5TB drive storing 1,649,267,441,664 bytes (actually 1.5TiB).
Do you really CARE about the exact number of bytes on the drive? Do you lovingly count each and every one of them? Or do you just care "1.5TB holds 50% more than 1TB, let me buy that one". Since all of the drive manufacturers use the same units and all of the units are consistent with the metric prefixes, why are you complaining?
Oh, it's because your stupid operating system reports your 1.5TB drive as a 1.36TB drive? Let me spell this out for you: all that means is that the operating system is wrong. Seriously, if the entire hard drive industry has accepted that 1TB = 10^12 bytes, why on earth is your operating system persisting in using an obsolete and incorrect definition of the unit? If it suddenly started reporting it as a 1.5TB drive, would that make you happy? The number of bytes on the drive doesn't change either way, of course.
You can't possibly tell me that you really NEED those extra bytes a 1.5TiB drive would have compared to a 1.5TB drive, so really you're just bitching about the OS not reporting the same number that the manufacturer does. And that's the OS's fault for being stupid.
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
Of course, everyone has their own drive horror stories, and there are many people who swear by a brand that others swear at.
Overall, I've had every brand die in every stage of their lifetimes, and I've found that I've RMA'd far more Seagate drives than any other brand. It's not that they are any worse, it's just that with the 5-year warranty, they are far more likely to still be in warranty.
So, I tend to buy the drive that best fits my needs and has a 5-year warranty. I've got Maxtor, Western Digital, and Seagate at this point in multiple arrays with a total of about 15TB.
The only things I have learned for sure is that I'll only use RAID-1, true hardware RAID-5 or 6 (no Intel ICHx "RAID-5"), and Linux software RAID-5 or 6...anything else is too dangerous for recovery.
That was due to the drives having built-in compression. And it turns out that 2:1 was about right at the time for a typical storage mix of code (which would get around 1.6:1) and data (text / spreadsheet files would get up to 5:1).
But now, most of the data on a large drive is already in a compressed format.
Eh, there are two main points which got conflated.
1) A drive this size will likely not be used for high-performance tasks. That is, it will probably be used for storage of music and movies rather than for applications and swap.
2) That enclosures will be slow.
Point 1 still hasn't been contested, and the first "troll" post didn't seem to care to discuss that--he just seemed to want to attack the idea that someone would only use a disk this size on a slow bus. The more I think about it, the more it sounds trollish--rather than attacking the thesis of the post, he nit-picked in order to argue.
Point 2--you're right. There are high-speed external enclosures, though in my experience, eSATA is fairly rare. I have a drive (used for backups) with both eSATA and USB, and I'd love to be able to use the eSATA, but so far, I have been unable to find an expansion card with suitable (if any) Linux support. Nonetheless, I'm not at all surprised that this was overlooked by the OP, but it's still irrelevant. If you don't need high write speeds, that should not deter you from buying this drive.
I wonder why nobody is making 5.25" hard drives anymore... With current technology they could have at least 10TB capacity...
Two words:
Angular Momentum
At the outside of the disk there would be an incredible amount of stress on the rotating media.
The head seek times would go up as well....
Though, while 7200+ RPM would certainly be out, and likely 5400 RPM as well (remember the old drives ran <= 3600RPM, I would consider a 4200 RPM 10 TB drive for near-line storage...
even 5.25/FH that would be a decent volumetric density (equivelent to 5x 3.5" drives).
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
there's a not insignificant chance that the stress of constant reading has killed one of the remaining good drives.
You are assuming that "stress" (high use) is a contributing factor to hard drive failure. This may not be so.
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