Seagate 7200.10 500GB: Hitting the Sweet Spot
by Gary Key and Dave Robinet on July 6, 2007 11:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Hardware Setup
We are utilizing an Intel QX6700 Quad Core CPU to ensure we are not CPU limited in our testing. A 2GB memory configuration is standard in our XP test bed as most enthusiasts are currently purchasing this amount of RAM. Our choice of high-range OCZ Reaper PC2-9200 memory offers a very wide range of memory settings with timings of 3-4-3-9 at DDR2-800 used for our benchmark results.
Our test bed now includes a water-cooled MSI 8800 GTX video card to ensure our game tests are not completely GPU bound and to reduce noise/heat levels. Our video tests are run at 1280x1024 resolution for this article at High Quality settings. All of our tests are run in an enclosed case with a dual optical/hard drive setup to reflect a moderately loaded system platform. Windows XP SP2 is fully updated and we load a clean drive image for each system to keep driver conflicts to a minimum.
The drive is formatted before each test run and five tests are completed on each drive in order to ensure consistency in the benchmark results. The two high and low scores are removed with the remaining score representing our reported result. We utilize the Intel ICH8R SATA ports along with the latest Intel Matrix Storage driver to ensure consistency in our playback results when utilizing NCQ, TCQ, or RAID settings.
Test Setup - Software
With the variety of disk drive benchmarks available, we needed a means of comparing the true performance of the hard drives in real world applications. While we will continue to utilize HD Tach, HD Tune, and PCMark05 for comparative benchmarks our logical choice for application benchmarking is the Intel iPEAK Storage Performance Toolkit version 3. The iPEAK test can be designed to measure "pure" hard disk performance, and in this case we kept the host adapter consistent while varying the hard drive models.
We utilize the iPEAK WinTrace32 program to record precise I/O operations when running real world benchmarks. We then utilize the iPEAK AnalyzeTrace program to review the disk trace file for integrity and ensure our trace files have properly captured the activities we required. Intel's RankDisk utility is used to play back the workload of all I/O operations that took place during the recording.
RankDisk generates results in a mean service time in milliseconds format; in other words, it gives the average time that each drive took to fulfill each I/O operation. In order to make the data more understandable, we report the scores as an average number of I/O operations per second so that higher scores translate into better performance in all of our iPEAK results. While these measurements will provide a score representing "pure" hard drive performance, the actual impact on the real world applications can and will be different due to system factors.
Our iPEAK tests represent a fairly extensive cross section of applications and usage patterns for both the general and enthusiast user. We will continually tailor these benchmarks with an eye towards the drive's intended usage and feature set when compared to similar drives. Hopefully our comments in the results sections will offer proper guidance for making a purchasing decision in these situations. Our iPEAK Test Suite consists of the following benchmarks.
VeriTest Business Winstone 2004: trace file of the entire test suite that includes applications such as Microsoft Office XP, WinZip 8.1, and Norton Antivirus 2003.
VeriTest Multimedia Content Creation 2004: trace file of the entire test suite that includes applications such as Adobe Photoshop 7.01, Macromedia Director MX 9.0, Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 9.0, Newtek Lightwave 3D 7.5b, and others.
AVG Antivirus 7.5: trace file of a complete antivirus scan on our test bed hard drive.
Microsoft Disk Defragmenter: trace file of the complete defragmentation process after the operating system and all applications were installed on our test bed hard drive.
WinRAR 3.70: trace file of creating a single compressed file consisting of 444 files in 10 different folders totaling 602MB. The test is split into the time it takes to compress the files and the time it takes to decompress the files.
File Transfer: individual trace files of transferring the Office Space DVD files to our source drive and transferring the files back to our test drive. The content being transferred consists of 29 files with a content size of 7.55GB.
AnyDVD 6.1: trace file of the time it takes to "rip" the Office Space DVD. We first copy the entire DVD over to our source drives, defragment the drive, and then measure the time it takes for AnyDVD to "rip" the contents to our test drive. While this is not ideal, it does remove the optical drive as a potential bottleneck during the extraction process and allows us to track the write performance of the drive.
Nero Recode 2: trace file of the time it takes to shrink the entire Office Space DVD that was extracted in the AnyDVD process into a single 4.5GB DVD image.
Game Installation: individual trace files of the time it takes to install Sims 2 and Battlefield 2. We copy each DVD to our secondary test drives, defragment the drive, and then install each game to our source drive.
Game Play: individual trace files that capture the startup and about 15 minutes of game play in each game. The Sims 2 trace file consists of the time it takes to select a preconfigured character, setup a university, downtown, business from each expansion pack (preloaded), and then visit each section before returning home. Our final trace file utilizes Battlefield 2 and we play the Daqing Oilfield map in both single and multiplayer mode.
| Standard Test Bed Playback of iPEAK Trace Files and Test Application Results |
|
| Processor | Intel QX6700 - 2.67GHz Quad Core 2x4MB |
| Motherboard | DFI Infinity 965-S |
| RAM | 2 x 1GB OCZ Reaper PC2-9200 Tested at DDR2-800, 3-4-3-9 |
| OS Hard Drive | 1 x Western Digital WD1500 Raptor - 150GB |
| System Platform Drivers | Intel 8.1.1.1010 Intel Matrix RAID 6.2.1.1002 |
| Video Card | 1 x MSI 8800GTX |
| Video Drivers | NVIDIA ForceWare 158.19 |
| Optical Drive | Plextor PX-760A, Plextor PX-B900A |
| Cooling | Tuniq 120 |
| Power Supply | Corsair HX620 |
| Case | Cooler Master CM Stacker 830 |
| Operating System | Windows XP Professional SP2 |
We are utilizing an Intel QX6700 Quad Core CPU to ensure we are not CPU limited in our testing. A 2GB memory configuration is standard in our XP test bed as most enthusiasts are currently purchasing this amount of RAM. Our choice of high-range OCZ Reaper PC2-9200 memory offers a very wide range of memory settings with timings of 3-4-3-9 at DDR2-800 used for our benchmark results.
Our test bed now includes a water-cooled MSI 8800 GTX video card to ensure our game tests are not completely GPU bound and to reduce noise/heat levels. Our video tests are run at 1280x1024 resolution for this article at High Quality settings. All of our tests are run in an enclosed case with a dual optical/hard drive setup to reflect a moderately loaded system platform. Windows XP SP2 is fully updated and we load a clean drive image for each system to keep driver conflicts to a minimum.
The drive is formatted before each test run and five tests are completed on each drive in order to ensure consistency in the benchmark results. The two high and low scores are removed with the remaining score representing our reported result. We utilize the Intel ICH8R SATA ports along with the latest Intel Matrix Storage driver to ensure consistency in our playback results when utilizing NCQ, TCQ, or RAID settings.
Test Setup - Software
With the variety of disk drive benchmarks available, we needed a means of comparing the true performance of the hard drives in real world applications. While we will continue to utilize HD Tach, HD Tune, and PCMark05 for comparative benchmarks our logical choice for application benchmarking is the Intel iPEAK Storage Performance Toolkit version 3. The iPEAK test can be designed to measure "pure" hard disk performance, and in this case we kept the host adapter consistent while varying the hard drive models.
We utilize the iPEAK WinTrace32 program to record precise I/O operations when running real world benchmarks. We then utilize the iPEAK AnalyzeTrace program to review the disk trace file for integrity and ensure our trace files have properly captured the activities we required. Intel's RankDisk utility is used to play back the workload of all I/O operations that took place during the recording.
RankDisk generates results in a mean service time in milliseconds format; in other words, it gives the average time that each drive took to fulfill each I/O operation. In order to make the data more understandable, we report the scores as an average number of I/O operations per second so that higher scores translate into better performance in all of our iPEAK results. While these measurements will provide a score representing "pure" hard drive performance, the actual impact on the real world applications can and will be different due to system factors.
Our iPEAK tests represent a fairly extensive cross section of applications and usage patterns for both the general and enthusiast user. We will continually tailor these benchmarks with an eye towards the drive's intended usage and feature set when compared to similar drives. Hopefully our comments in the results sections will offer proper guidance for making a purchasing decision in these situations. Our iPEAK Test Suite consists of the following benchmarks.
VeriTest Business Winstone 2004: trace file of the entire test suite that includes applications such as Microsoft Office XP, WinZip 8.1, and Norton Antivirus 2003.
VeriTest Multimedia Content Creation 2004: trace file of the entire test suite that includes applications such as Adobe Photoshop 7.01, Macromedia Director MX 9.0, Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 9.0, Newtek Lightwave 3D 7.5b, and others.
AVG Antivirus 7.5: trace file of a complete antivirus scan on our test bed hard drive.
Microsoft Disk Defragmenter: trace file of the complete defragmentation process after the operating system and all applications were installed on our test bed hard drive.
WinRAR 3.70: trace file of creating a single compressed file consisting of 444 files in 10 different folders totaling 602MB. The test is split into the time it takes to compress the files and the time it takes to decompress the files.
File Transfer: individual trace files of transferring the Office Space DVD files to our source drive and transferring the files back to our test drive. The content being transferred consists of 29 files with a content size of 7.55GB.
AnyDVD 6.1: trace file of the time it takes to "rip" the Office Space DVD. We first copy the entire DVD over to our source drives, defragment the drive, and then measure the time it takes for AnyDVD to "rip" the contents to our test drive. While this is not ideal, it does remove the optical drive as a potential bottleneck during the extraction process and allows us to track the write performance of the drive.
Nero Recode 2: trace file of the time it takes to shrink the entire Office Space DVD that was extracted in the AnyDVD process into a single 4.5GB DVD image.
Game Installation: individual trace files of the time it takes to install Sims 2 and Battlefield 2. We copy each DVD to our secondary test drives, defragment the drive, and then install each game to our source drive.
Game Play: individual trace files that capture the startup and about 15 minutes of game play in each game. The Sims 2 trace file consists of the time it takes to select a preconfigured character, setup a university, downtown, business from each expansion pack (preloaded), and then visit each section before returning home. Our final trace file utilizes Battlefield 2 and we play the Daqing Oilfield map in both single and multiplayer mode.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
19 Comments
View All Comments
TA152H - Sunday, July 8, 2007 - link
That's absurd, for a hard drive company to make consistently lousy drives would kill it. There is reputation, and reputation matters a hell of lot. Are you too young to remember the nickname "Crashtor" for Maxtor drives? They shrunk big time when their drives sucked. So, no, they can't afford to make sucky drives that break all the time, but even within the context of a warranty, why do you suppose Western Digital and Hitachi don't do it if it's so inexpensive? Hmmmmm, maybe because they can't?Seagate has never had the notoriety for failures that IBM or Western Digital has. IBM's were of course more publicized, but even Western Digital's were fairly well known. Since people who are buying drives for servers and such are generally much smarter than the average person, and have good memories (scars?) when hardware fails, there is still some residual antipathy for IBM/Hitachi hard disks, and Western Digital. I haven't heard anything bad about Samsung, but I bought three of them and they all sucked. One was DOA, the other stopped working after a year, and the other had such an annoying whine to it, I eventually pulled it and used it as a projectile against encroaching squirrels. If other people have these experiences with Samsung, and people do tell other people they know, they may also have a less than stellar reputation, despite not being as publicized as IBM or Western Digital. Seagate, despite being the best known hard disk maker since the creation of the IBM PC XT, has managed to gain an excellent reputation for their drives. My only fear is that since they bought "Crashtor", it might take a few years to get back on track after absorbing that miserable company, so I've been avoiding them for a while. To this date, I have never had a Seagate hard drive fail, despite using them almost exclusively.
Anyone know what happened to Quantum? Boy did they suck. They whined worse than a kid at a carnival that didn't have enough money to buy cotton candy. What awful drives. Probably another company ate them.
ielmox - Tuesday, July 24, 2007 - link
Late 2001 - commissioned a system with the blisteringly fast IBM Deskstar. These drives smoked the competition and I was impressed with IBM engineering. Six months later, my system exploded and I became acquainted with the nickname "Deathstar".2002 - the contractor replaced the Deathstars with Crashtors. Failure less than 2 months later.
2002 - exasperated contractor installed Seagates, telling me that if these failed as well then my body must be emitting some sort of destructive magnetic field. The Seagates are still going strong today, and my PC is on for weeks at a time and under constant BitTorrent activity.
I like the performance indicated by recent AT and other articles for Samsung and Hitachi drives, but I respect the Seagate brand for its reliability and warranty. I'm really looking forward to seeing reviews of the Barracuda 7200.11, assuming of course that it ever makes the leap from press release concept to actual market product.
JakeBlade - Saturday, July 7, 2007 - link
Conveniently didn't include the latest 750GB Western Digital SE which blows away even the 1TB Hitachi.Also, I disagree with the weak brown nose attempt at the end by saying this turd 7200.10 drive "would still be a very solid choice for a gaming machine." Ummm, any gaming machine I build would have the 160GB WD or the Raptor. Then if you want mass storage for multimedia or binaries you get a Samsung T166 which is dead silent, has huge transfer rates, and is low priced.
DerekWilson - Saturday, July 7, 2007 - link
You really have to keep in mind that in a well designed game running on a system with a good amount of RAM, HD speed really won't impact gameplay. Yeah, install patching and load times will be affected, but generally gameplay is not a factor.We've seen it in real world benchmarks time and time again. If a game developer wants to make a playable game, there's just no way they can allow disk speed to become a performance factor.
The recent exception to this is S.T.A.L.K.E.R., which can hit the disk pretty hard when caching large areas of the map. Honestly, this was a poor design decision on the part of the developer. But you can actually adjust the behavior of the game here and get better performance with less caching. Tweakguides.com has a good description of how to do this.
Either way, a gamer is almost always better off putting more money into cpu, ram, or gpu.
TA152H - Saturday, July 7, 2007 - link
Good, thorough, review, but I have a couple of questions.Maybe the purpose of this question might make more sense if I first say I only buy Seagate hard disks, having had reliability problems with both Western Digital and IBM (Hitachi) and have been extremely happy with Seagate reliability (maybe it's no coincidence they offer longer warranties). Consequently, I don't care how these drives compare with them (although, certainly others will, so I'm not at all saying they shouldn't have been compared with them), but more curious about how it compared with the 7200.9.
The results were extremely impressive vis-a-vis the 7200.9, which concerns me because they seem too good. The problem is, it isn't too clear what exactly you picked for the 7200.9 . Did this also have a 16 mb cache? I suspect it was probably a little smaller and that might explain the huge (relatively) performance improvement of the 7200.9. It also might have been interesting to list the cache sizes of the competing drives, although it is probably possible for someone to look them up (again, since I wouldn't even consider them, I haven't bothered, but someone that would might be interested). 16 mb is kind of large, and might explain some of the "personality" of the hard disk, and why sometimes the lower raw performance is masked in certain benchmarks. I'm guessing, of course.
One other question that you might not know how to test for (I don't). If you have a hard disk that is sleeping and you request data for it that is on cache, does it spin up or is it smart enough to know this is unnecessary?
nrb - Saturday, July 7, 2007 - link
That Hitachi 7K1000 comes out of the benchmark rather well. Those accoustic scores are astonishing.Nossy - Saturday, July 7, 2007 - link
I guess I will wait for the new Seagate 7200.11 drives. This was a good review, but I don't understand why it's done now, right before a new generation of drives comes out?Regs - Friday, July 6, 2007 - link
Though it didn't come with any mount screws so I didin't install it yet.In the real world the guess the performance outside of a server would'nt be noticed. Fair assumption?
CrystalBay - Friday, July 6, 2007 - link
Cmon Regs, no mount screws ?