Seagate Serial ATA HD Review - Features and Performance
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Seagate is touting their "3D Defense System" for their current drives. Full specs can be read at the link, but here is a synopsis:
Drive Defense
G-Force Protection—encompasses internal design enhancements made to Seagate disc drives, helping give the Seagate drives the industry's highest non-operating shock spec of 350 G's at 2 milliseconds.
SeaShield® Covers—provides ESD and handling safety, particularly to the Printed Circuit Board Assembly (PCBA) board.
Seagate's SeaShield®.
SeaShell—a revolutionary disc drive package, replacing the drive's Electro-Static Discharge (ESD) bag with a more protective, easier-to-use, recyclable package.
Data Defense
Seagate's Advanced Multidrive System (SAMS)—SAMS reduces the rotational vibration (RV) effects of multiple drives seeking inside a cabinet.
ECC (error-correction code)—provides on-the-fly hardware correction.
Safe Sparing—ensures that the drive knows to return to the same sector it was sparing after a power outage.
Continuous Background Defect Scanning—proactively identifies and eliminates defects.
On-the-Fly Triple Interleave Reed-Solomon Code—for thermal asperity (TA) recovery and resultant data integrity.
End-to-End Path Protection—ensures data integrity from host to disc.
Diagnostic Defense
SeaTools—diagnostic utility software.
Enhanced S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology)—predicts and prevents problems transparently before they affect the end-user.
Web-Based Tools—enable users to identify and solve some common nondisc-related problems.
DLD (Drive Logging Diagnostics)—Captures unrecoverable failure data that is essential for interactive diagnostic work.
PERFORMANCE
On to the moment of truth...
TEST SETUP
- AMD XP 2700+
- ABIT AT7 MAX2 (C5 BIOS)
- 512 MB Kingston HyperX DDR3500
- Seagate Barracuda SATA V ST3120023AS
- Western Digital WD800JB
- Western Digital WD800BB
- ATI 9700 PRO
- Cool Max 550W PSU
- AquaXtreme H2O Kit
BENCHMARKS
- HD Tach (v 2.61)
- PCMARK2002
- SiSoft Sandra File System Benchmark (2003)
- ATTO Disk Benchmark (v2.02)
SOFTWARE
- Windows XP w/ SP1 & DX9
- VIA Hyperion 4in1 v 4.45
- ATI Catalyst v 3.0
Testing was conducted with the drives formatted, and partitioned (NTFS) to their fullest capacity. The tests were run from the primary boot drive (80 GB Maxtor ATA133 7200 RPM). The tests were conducted on the ABIT AT7 MAX2 with support for Serial ATA via the onboard Marvell 88i8030 controller (controlled via the Highpoint HPT 374 IDE controller, 374_123 driver), and also the Silicon Image SiI 3112 SATALink Controller (1.0.0.41 driver).
HD TACH
Left: WD800BB Right: WD800JB
Left: Seagate SATA150 onboard Marvell 88i8030
Right: Seagate SATA150 on SiI 3112
Seagate SATA150 RAID 0
With these tests, we can see that SATA is still in its infancy. The Seagate drive gets beaten out by both WD drives. Even with the 8MB cache, and theoretical 150Mb burst rate, the maturity of the WD drives shines in HD Tach. Word has it that XP is not optimized for the SATA specifications yet, so hopefully we will see a service pack to take care of this, along with maturing drivers.
Next: More Performance and Conclusion >>
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