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

[zsouthboy]

A whopping 2.4 MB/s (+ overhead, as you say)?

You realize that most modern drives are able to handle 60 MB/s with ease, even the low end ones, right?

You don't need 6 hard drives RAIDed to *watch* video...

Re:Write speed

[Belial6]

Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience.

That is just true. So from now on, it should be written...

Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience.

--Znork

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.

Re:Write speed

[afidel]

Come on, any SATA drive can play an HD movie, even a BluRay rip comes out at what 45Mbit/s max, that's a punny 4.5MB/s, something IDE drives could do almost two decades ago.

Re:Write speed

[speedingant]

It's definitely your processor. 2Ghz C2D is absolute minimum for playing 1080p, even more for high bitrate media. Try using XBMC for playback, it's very efficient and may help you until you can afford to purchase another computer.

Re:Write speed

[afabbro]

If your server has 128GB of ram then a 256GB swap file is 'normal'.

Only if you're pedantically following advice from 10 years ago. Swap "must be" 2x RAM was a suggestion at one time, but hardly required, and perhaps not even universally agreed upon best practice.

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

[Warll]

I didn't RTFA but I can guess it:

0|1|1|1|0|1|0|0|0|1|1|0|1|0|0|1|0|1|1|0|1|1|1|0|0|1|1|1|1|0|0|1|0|0|1|0|0|0|0|0

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:

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

Re:Capacity is hardly news anymore

[Firemouth]

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?

Re:Capacity is hardly news anymore

[MBGMorden]

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.

Re:Capacity is hardly news anymore

[Mashiki]

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.

Re:fp?

[thepotoo]

I swear, if you were any more dense, you'd fall within your own Schwarzschild radius, become a black hole, and we wouldn't have to deal with you anymore.

Hey, everybody's thinking it, I'm just saying it. ;)

But they didn't even do 1T right...

[pseudorand]

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).

Re:But they didn't even do 1T right...

[Taibhsear]

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.

Re:But they didn't even do 1T right...

[greg1104]

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].

Re:But they didn't even do 1T right...

[greg1104]

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.

Re:Capacity is hardly news anymore

[Anonymous Coward]

I've managed to fill 2/3rds of my 1TB storage drive already.

Your wrist must be tired!

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:Capacity is hardly news anymore

[Pentium100]

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...

Linux will freeze with these 1.5TB drives

[tivojafa]

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.

Terabyte Tebibyte?

[AliasMarlowe]

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.

Re:Capacity is hardly news anymore

[networkBoy]

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