Is Seagate taking over FULL market leadership?

H

hjreggel

Weaksauce
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Sep 23, 2005
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Hi,

I'm not talking about the Maxtor deal, reliability or stability. Actually, I am slightly biased against Seagate for personal reasons. But...

I was checking the manufacturers' websites because I am currently updating my harddisk overview. Seagate has a lot of news or existing products (from small to large):
- 12GB 1" harddisk
- 60GB 1.8" single-platter(!) harddisk
- 40GB 2.5" ruggedized harddisk (-30 to +85°C operating range, up to 4400m altitude)
- 160GB 7200RPM 2.5" harddisk
- 750GB 3.5" harddisk
- 300GB 15,000RPM SCSI/SAS harddisk with claimed 73-125MB/s

What's going on here? Or is this the same "lame" story as with the Momentus 7200.1 that took about 22 months from datasheet to delivery?

Well, at least Hitachi seems to be busy making stupid cartoons instead of harddisks...

Hans-Jürgen
 
Seagate surely has a lot of nice anouncements and I am more than looking forward to some of their new drives, such as the Laptop drive with 256MB of flash.

However, it appears that they missed the boat with their 7200.9 series in terms of desktop, single user performance. Considering that I have not seen and SR benchmarks of their newer releases, I am not going to pass judgement on them.
 
Plain and simple they are the first to market with drives sporting perpendicular technology. Hitachi is still months out and WD is way behind (they are more of a marketing company than a technology company, but that is another thread entirely..). They WILL be the market leader in every form factor for at least a year until someone else starts shipping perpendicular products. An example... The Hitachi 500GB is a 5 platter, the Seagate 750 GB is a 4 platter.
 
drizzt81 said:
Seagate surely has a lot of nice anouncements, however it appears that the performance -at least on the desktop segment- isn't up to par.
Click to expand...

HAHAHA....... have you benchmarked their new 750 GB drive? It's approaching Raptor 150 speeds in sustained reads. I'm assuming by your post that you are one of the WD sheep on this board. As I mentioned previously, Seagate is a technology company, WD is a marketing company. WD has NO enterprise class drives, hence the very liberal labeling of their RE and Raptor series as "Enterprise". Also, what really is really telling is OEM use. OEMs but drives through an extensive qualification before using them in their systems. How many of the top 5 are using WD?? '0' How many are using Seagate?? All 5
 
StorageJoe said:
HAHAHA....... have you benchmarked their new 750 GB drive? It's approaching Raptor 150 speeds in sustained reads. I'm assuming by your post that you are one of the WD sheep on this board. As I mentioned previously, Seagate is a technology company, WD is a marketing company. WD has NO enterprise class drives, hence the very liberal labeling of their RE and Raptor series as "Enterprise". Also, what really is really telling is OEM use. OEMs but drives through an extensive qualification before using them in their systems. How many of the top 5 are using WD?? '0' How many are using Seagate?? All 5
Click to expand...
ok let me edit my post to make it more clear.
 
Just ordered the Seagate 7200.10 ST3320620AS from The Egg. I am also currently running a Raptor WD740ADFD, so I will do some side by side stuff to see how apps compare. I love these Raptors, but man o man are their low-pitched grindings annoying at times.

I am definitely excited to have a quiter HD again in the rig, not to mention one that has 320GB of space in perpendicular fashion!

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822148140
 
StorageJoe said:
HAHAHA....... have you benchmarked their new 750 GB drive? It's approaching Raptor 150 speeds in sustained reads.
Click to expand...
Sure, the increased density helps when it comes to linear performance, but there is a lot more to making a good desktop drive that pure transfer speeds.
 
StorageJoe said:
HAHAHA....... have you benchmarked their new 750 GB drive? It's approaching Raptor 150 speeds in sustained reads.
Click to expand...

I just setup a client with a 15 drive RAID5 with 750Gb drives and the thing is incredible! I was just looking and newegg now has a 320Gb drive for ~$120 that is perpendicular and appears to be close in speed to the raptor for a whole lot less! I have been a fan of seagate for a few years now and at least until somebody else can come through with something a lot better they are going to stay in the lead :)
 
If you look at Seagate's press releases, you'll see that these announcements are almost just a roadmap of products to come. Some of the products will not see availability until 2007 (Seagate's words).
 
StorageJoe said:
HAHAHA....... have you benchmarked their new 750 GB drive? It's approaching Raptor 150 speeds in sustained reads.
Click to expand...
No, I haven't. I'd love to see your results, though - please, post away! SR forumites seem to think the drive is loud, and 14ms seek times don't inspire confidence. Anandtech reports 51.5 MB/s for the Seagate versus 75 for the Raptor. Extremetech says 13/14ms seek and 65 MB/s. I'll stick with the Raptor, thanks.
StorageJoe said:
I'm assuming by your post that you are one of the WD sheep on this board. As I mentioned previously, Seagate is a technology company, WD is a marketing company. WD has NO enterprise class drives, hence the very liberal labeling of their RE and Raptor series as "Enterprise". Also, what really is really telling is OEM use. OEMs but drives through an extensive qualification before using them in their systems. How many of the top 5 are using WD?? '0' How many are using Seagate?? All 5
Click to expand...
I'm assuming from *your* post that you haven't tested those "Enterprise" disks Seagate's supposed to have. Consistently behind, to put it nicely. I think the only reason anyone would buy Seagate disks for high-end stuff is they haven't tried anything else. Add in an Argumentum ad populum (They're all doing it, therefore it's right!) (Who says they're not doing it because it's cheap?) and I'm about ready to dismiss your entire post. Oh, and Compaq uses Maxtor, Dell uses WD and Seagate, and generally everyone uses what's cheapest. There's no brand loyalty in the bottom-end computer market. Sorry to disillusion you.

 
StorageJoe said:
HAHAHA....... I'm assuming by your post that you are one of the WD sheep on this board. *snip* WD is a marketing company. WD has NO enterprise class drives, hence the very liberal labeling of their RE and Raptor series as "Enterprise".
Click to expand...

And you, sir, are a Seagate shill.

Kettle to Pot. You're Black. Repeat, Pot, you're black!
 
unhappy_mage said:
Oh, and Compaq uses Maxtor, Dell uses WD and Seagate, and generally everyone uses what's cheapest. There's no brand loyalty in the bottom-end computer market. Sorry to disillusion you.

Click to expand...


Bottom-end is not what we're talking about. We're not talking about 80gb pata drives here. We're talking about RE and NL drives. ("enterprise" SATA drives from WD and Seagate.) NONE of the 5 use the RE drives. They never passed qualification tests with any of the 5 OEMs for RAID use.

As far as testing the drives go. I ran (3) of the 750 GB drives on a Arena 2gb FC to SATA RAID controller and was sustaining 195mb/s reads off of a RAID 5 set. That's screaming.
 
Yawn...

Buy what is the best deal at the time, and no, Seagate won't take FULL market leadership. The HDD market is going thru consolidation now as it matures and the main market differentiators technology/performance/costs/product lifecycles have shrunk.

I don't think HDDs are sexy enough to fight over, no matter how many screaming bajigawatts of performance and sustained seek times on vertical platters they may have. Won't getcha laid or promoted.
 
StorageJoe said:
As far as testing the drives go. I ran (3) of the 750 GB drives on a Arena 2gb FC to SATA RAID controller and was sustaining 195mb/s reads off of a RAID 5 set. That's screaming.
Click to expand...
Wow, STR! Everything uses that, right? Testing *three* drives with a high-end controller (with cache on it, I assume? Looks like up to 1GB on the linked model...) doesn't say anything about a single disk, as far as I'm concerned. And STR isn't very relevant to real world performance in many, many applications.

 
StorageJoe said:
We're talking about RE and NL drives. ("enterprise" SATA drives from WD and Seagate.) NONE of the 5 use the RE drives. They never passed qualification tests with any of the 5 OEMs for RAID use.
Click to expand...
Come now, there's a lot more at work than simple engineering behind the scenes of the major OEMs in what components they choose. This is politics, and you better believe Seagate will be doing all the negotiating they know how to keep the status quo in that sector. WD will have to fight to break into that market, and with their RE drives they have a chance. At $dayjob, we run two 12x 3u rackmount SATA arrays, populated with WD 400gb RE. And they work like a charm. But then again we're not the kind of company to go with off the shelf solutions to anything.... :D
 
unhappy_mage said:
No, I haven't. I'd love to see your results, though - please, post away! SR forumites seem to think the drive is loud, and 14ms seek times don't inspire confidence. Anandtech reports 51.5 MB/s for the Seagate versus 75 for the Raptor. Extremetech says 13/14ms seek and 65 MB/s. I'll stick with the Raptor, thanks.

I'm assuming from *your* post that you haven't tested those "Enterprise" disks Seagate's supposed to have. Consistently behind, to put it nicely. I think the only reason anyone would buy Seagate disks for high-end stuff is they haven't tried anything else. Add in an Argumentum ad populum (They're all doing it, therefore it's right!) (Who says they're not doing it because it's cheap?) and I'm about ready to dismiss your entire post. Oh, and Compaq uses Maxtor, Dell uses WD and Seagate, and generally everyone uses what's cheapest. There's no brand loyalty in the bottom-end computer market. Sorry to disillusion you.

Click to expand...

Are you kidding me?

Consistently Behind -> October 2005


Welcome to 8 months ago. :rolleyes:
 
unhappy_mage said:
Oh, and Compaq uses Maxtor, Dell uses WD and Seagate, and generally everyone uses what's cheapest. There's no brand loyalty in the bottom-end computer market. Sorry to disillusion you.
Click to expand...

He's 100% right. OEMs sell whatever they can get the greatest margin on unless the customer specifically asks for something out of the norm in a custom system (Maxtor drives seem to be the cheapest overall). I don't work in sales, but I do work for an OEM appliance builder.
 
There is more to a hard drive than just performance. Seagate does have a strong reputation when it comes to drives running quiet and cool, and their reliability is brought into question a lot less often than WD/Maxtor.

To be, those things would be worth giving up a few milliseconds on seek time, but, I will wait and see what all is out when I get ready to build.
 
NulloModo said:
There is more to a hard drive than just performance. Seagate does have a strong reputation when it comes to drives running quiet and cool, and their reliability is brought into question a lot less often than WD/Maxtor.

To be, those things would be worth giving up a few milliseconds on seek time, but, I will wait and see what all is out when I get ready to build.
Click to expand...
Having a look at the SR Reliability Survey the 7200.8 series has 199 commited responses and a percentile of 11, i.e. 89% of all HDDs in the database are more reliable. The 74GB raptor has 161 responses and a percentile of 77. The WD2500JD has 67 reponses and a percentile of 19.

Given that information, it would appear that drive reliability may vary greatly even within a single manufacturer.
 
jen4950 said:
Are you kidding me?

Consistently Behind -> October 2005


Welcome to 8 months ago. :rolleyes:
Click to expand...
Here's another link, only 4 months ago (and, I might add, the most recent of storagereview's reviews - where's the 7200.10, guys!?) with Seagate on the bottom in single-user, bottom in gaming (almost) and, I'll be the first to admit, pretty much on top in server-type stuff. Lots of people use the Seagate drives for raid arrays, and that's a fine use for them. But as a single drive? The Seagates are my last choice as a boot disk.

Oh, and here's another site doing a benchmark of the 7200.8 400GB against the previous generation of drives - Seagate was first to market that generation, so all the other drives are hampered by the lower density - but it still manages to lose to a Maxtor unit an entire generation back, and with half the density. Yes, it's in Dutch. You can still read the graphs even if you don't speak the language.

Lastly, let's see some results to the contrary. I haven't seen a review of the 7200.10 from a site that actually benchmarks something relevant (no, GamePC doesn't count :rolleyes: ). When someone does, I'll be glad to admit that the 7200.10 is fast. But the 7200.8 and .9 were and are crap for single-drive, non-storage apps.

 
unhappy_mage said:
Lastly, let's see some results to the contrary. I haven't seen a review of the 7200.10 from a site that actually benchmarks something relevant (no, GamePC doesn't count :rolleyes: ). When someone does, I'll be glad to admit that the 7200.10 is fast. But the 7200.8 and .9 were and are crap for single-drive, non-storage apps.

Click to expand...


Did you read that review at GamePC? It made my brain hurt :)

Seagate’s previous generation 7200.9 disk struggled in Iometer, providing us some of the lowest numbers for a 7,200 RPM disk. The 7200.10 does significantly better, as the drive performs on par with Western Digital’s Caviar SE16 in workstation usage patterns, which was the reigning champion of 7200 RPM hard drives. In file server usage patterns, the SE16 maintains a solid edge over the 7200.10, but Seagate’s new drive does again show increased performance levels.
So they made it faster but still not on par with the WD from what I see

In a RAID-0 configuration, we see a pair of Barracuda 7200.10 drives performing right about on par with Western Digital’s Raptor series hard drives.

But in a Raid-0 configuration for ONLY the Seagate drive. Why do they even have these things in a raid array at all in the review when NO other drive is treated this way. It just baffles me. ?

The text in red is mine but the rest is a direct quote from the GamePC "review"
 
Tormond said:
Did you read that review at GamePC? It made my brain hurt :)
Click to expand...
Nope, I just linked it. I knew what it'd be like. Pretty graphs, un-pretty grammar, and ridiculous tests.

Storagereview, <3, but it'd be nice to see you guys, y'know, review something. Maxline Pro (the 500GB ones), 7200.10, Samsung T133 series, I'd love to see benchmarks on any of those.

 
The origional point of this thread was questioning the fact the Seagate is taking market leadership. This for the most part is true. They aquired Maxtor, and even though 1+1 does not equal 2 in this case, they've bought a big chunk of market share. More importantly though, they are the only one shipping a perpendicular desktop drive. The next closest in Hitachi, but they are still months out. Because of this, Seagate will really dominate the high end SATA market for the forseable future. No one else has a 750 GB or will have a 750 GB drive for quite some time. The Hitachi 500GB is 5 platter, the Seagate 750 GB is 4. They have a lot going for them right now.
 
Hi Joe,

Thanks for bringing the discussion back to what I intended to say. I was just about to post a similar comment.

Each manufacturer had some "special" item. Hitachi had the widest range, but what Seagate announced is almost everything except for 0.85inch (lol) and 10.000 RPM SATA (they would have been better off buying WD).

They took the leadership for biggest 3.5" and biggest 9.5mm 2.5" (Fujitsu has larger 12.5mm). They re-entered the 1.8" market by announcing their ST18 and they joined the "Ruggedized" / "Automotive" market by announcing the EE25.

Hitachi is the only remaining manufacturer with a wide range. OK, they are not that far behind in the main field: They announced the Deskstar T7K500, a 3-platter 500GB and the Travelstar 5K160, a 160GB 2.5".
But they are way behind with their 1.8" and I don't think they can keep up with the SAS/SCSI announcements of Seagate.

Hans-Jürgen
 
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