After buying a
Drobo, I populated it with two of Seagate's Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB SATA drives. They were the largest at the time of purchase (I think it still is - 2TB drives are on the horizon), and was a good deal at $99 each at Fry's Electronics (Black Friday sale). If it wasn't for the price, I would have bought those Western Digital Green drives instead.
Barracuda 7200.11The Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 is Seagate's 11th generation drive spinning at 7200 RPMs. The 1.5 TB drive consists of 4 platters, each with 375 GB capacity, taking full advantage of the new perpendicular recording process. This is the highest density available on the market! It should help with data throughput and reducing latencies. Translation? This ought to be one of the highest performaning drives out there. To help, there is also 32 MB of onboard cache.
InstallationThe drive looks no different than any other 3.5" desktop hard drive. This is good, since it's a very familar form factor. Installation is easy as pie. I bought the retail boxed version, which comes with cloning software, a SATA cable, a molex to SATA power adapter, a four mounting screws, and a warantee card.
Just slide the drive into your case's hard drive cage or bay, and mount it however the case manufacturer instruct you to. The SATA cable is much easier to deal with than the older IDE ribbon cables of yore. However, I still find both the data and power cable for SATA to be more fragile, so becareful!
PerformanceBefore I stuck the drives into the Data Robot (the Drobo), I put it in my HTPC to test performance without the bottleneck of the USB 2.0 ports, as well as Drobo's internal algorithms. The configuration is as follows:
Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L rev 2 motherboardIntel Pentium Dual-Core E2180 2.0 GHz CPU2x 1GB of DDR2 RAM
nVidia GeForce 8500GT PCI-E
Windows Vista Home Premium x86 (32-bit)I used the built-in SATA controller that is integrated on the Intel P35 chipset.
Using HDTach, I was able to get a burst speed of 247.3 MB/sec. This is near the theoretical maximum for the SATA II interface (which is 300 MB/sec). While impressive, this data is coming from the fast onboard 32 MB cache memory. The real meat is in the disk transfer rate!
The average read rate is 105.4 MB/sec, which is actually faster than my
WD Raptors (they spin at 10,000 RPMs)! Random access times are 15ms, however, which is about twice as slow as the Raptors. This is expected, since the higher rotation speeds is what gives the Raptors their latency advantage.
For a more real-life situation, I decided to unplug my main HDD and replaced it temporarily with the Barracuda, installed Windows Vista Home Edition (32-bit), and checked the overall snappiness. Overall, I was impressed at how quickly everything seem to load. Windows seem to boot at around the minute mark. For a pig of an OS, that's pretty impressive.
Heat and NoiseNoise doesn't seem to be an issue at all. In fact, it is one of the quietest drive I've ever used! Even during heavy seeking and thrashing, the Seagate is less noiser than the
500GB Western Digital Caviar I currently have in there! That's saying a lot, because in the review, I stated the WD Caviar drive was already quiet!
It does get pretty hot to the touch, however. After leaving the drive on for about an hour or so, I can barely touch it for more than a few seconds! This is due to the fact that it's a four platter drive. The more platters you have, the more energy it takes to keep them spinning. Also this means more weight and friction between the disks and the air around it. All of this contribute to the heat production. Thankfully, the Drobo enclosure I use is well ventilated.
Problems?While I've read many reports of people having problems with the 7200.11 series of drives from Seagate, I have yet to have any bad experiences with mine. I own two of these 1.5TB drives and it's been about 6 months in constant use.
It seems to be related to the firmware, and Seagate have since issued firmware updates to fix the issue. I haven't kept up with this since I wasn't affected, but it appears that it was enough to keep some Seagate customers away from future purchases.
I, on the other hand, have ventured off and bought a lower-capacity drive of the same series (1 TB). I also have yet to have any issues with that drive, either.
Buyer beware? Perhaps, but I do believe the issue should be resolved by the time you're reading this.
The UpshotThe Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB SATA drive is fast when it comes to sequential reading and writing! It's still pretty darn good at random reads, but the latencies drag the performance down quite a bit. Still, as a large drive inside of a Drobo enclosure or a RAID5 array (usually going through the network), the hard drive itself won't be the bottleneck.
Seagate was first out the gate with a 1.5TB drive, but Western Digital is first with the a new 2.0 TB Caviar Green. Sure, it spins at a lowly 5400 RPMs, but these large drives should really be used for mass storage.
All in all, I am very happy with my purchase.
