[BMR] Seagate's new Sata III Hard Drive

3769 Views 38 Replies 17 Participants Last post by pvp309rcp, Dec 5, 2009

Enigma8750

Discussion Starter · Dec 4, 2009

Seagate Barracuda XT 2TB 3.5" Hard Drive

Quote:

Seagate Barracuda XT ST32000641AS Review

What to expect (NOT) from SATA-6Gbps (SATA III):

Not an immediate and dramatic across the board performance change.

Cache efficient and intensive applications will see immediate benefit.

Application optimization, controller, driver and OS optimization and areal density and other pending HDD technology will combine to push performance higher over the next 2-3 years.

Quote:

On 21 September 2009 Seagate Technology was the first and only manufacturer to offer a SATA 6Gbps (aka SATA-III) hard drive product with the industry's largest 64MB cache buffer as the 2TB Barracuda XT ST32000641AS was unveiled. Both combined improvements to burst rate and sustained bandwidth will mark a substantial improvement to the design of Hard Disk Drive (HDD) storage products, and the new technology is expected to give Solid State Drive (SSD) components some serious competition.

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The current Seagate family includes a low-power Barracuda LP, and a mainstream Barracuda 7200.12 hard drive. This new edition to the desktop hard drive family carves out the Barracuda XT for the upper-tier of performance. Benchmark Reviews has had great success with the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 series in the past, which already rivaled performance from the WD VelociRaptor in some tests, but Seagate plans to drop the 'dot' designation on the 7200 series and simplify their desktop storage family to Barracuda LS, Barracuda, and Barracuda XT.

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Benchmark Reviews expects to have a Seagate Barracuda XT product sample in October (2009), and we'll soon see just exactly how much more the new 6.0 GB/s interface adds to sustained file transfers on our ASUS P7P55D Premium test motherboard. There's no question that the increase from 32- to 64MB of internal cache buffer will improve the drives overall quickness, but which deserves the credit: 64MB cache or SATA-III 6Gbps? Seagate's David Burks explained that both are to be thanked. Cache gives the biggest boost, but once that cache is saturated with file(s), the larger bandwidth pipeline helps to transfer files to and from the disk. Furthermore, enthusiasts can 'short-stroke' the drive to make use of only the outer platter by using Seagate's SeaTools software.

Currently the Seagate SeaTools software only allows users to define a Logical Block Address (LBA) range, which can then be saved onto the drive's firmware. As of now this process requires an enthusiast to understand the total capacity of their drive in order to assign a short-stroke setting, but Seagate already has enthusiast how-to guides in the works. Taking a moment to step back and view the big picture, this could be Seagate's last stab at competing against the 10,000RPM WD VelociRaptor before launching their own SSD product line.

http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.ph...=390&Itemid=60

NEWEGG [Thanks Diabolical999]
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822148506

Special Comment

While Seagate has been THE benchmark for Hard drives construction for as long as I can remember it's recent acquisition of Maxtor may have temporarily dropped the overall quality of the Seagate line over the past year dropping under Western Digital in overall customer satisfaction. This being said, I think that Seagate can and will overcome this problem and come back to number 1 status as the Sata III's new drivers and the Motherboards begin to take full advantage of the Sata III's full potential. It was very smart for Seagate to make this new Hard Drive Backwards comparable all the way back to 1.5 gbs, 3.0 gbs, and 6 gbs but the new motherboards are still not ready for the new hard drives yet, but buying one now would probably not be a bad purchase for the future. It is plainly clear that the SSD technology will be the new drive of the future but in the meantime for us poor Overclockers, we do have another road to travel with this new Hard drive line.

Basically at the time of this Posting this Hard drive beats the Velo Raptor in Speed and Space with 2 TBs . Not too bad. Especially the new trick of letting you uses the outer part of the platters over the inners due to the speed differential.

Note: The new trick is not so new but it is new for the Seagate tools line of Software.

I give this Item 3 out of 5 Cool Points.

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