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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."

12 of 283 comments (clear)

  1. Write speed by qoncept · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:Write speed by zsouthboy · · Score: 5, Informative

      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...

    2. Re:Write speed by Sancho · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:Write speed by afidel · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

      --
      There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
  2. An In-Depth Look At Seagate's 1.5TB Barracuda: by Warll · · Score: 5, Funny
    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

  3. Re:Capacity is hardly news anymore by Firemouth · · Score: 5, Informative

    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?

  4. Re:fp? by thepotoo · · Score: 5, Funny
    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. ;)

    --
    Obligatory Soundbite Catchphrase
  5. 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 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].

  6. Re:Capacity is hardly news anymore by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    Your wrist must be tired!

  7. Linux will freeze with these 1.5TB drives by tivojafa · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  8. Re:Capacity is hardly news anymore by networkBoy · · Score: 5, Informative

    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