Fastest 500GB HDD Available and other random questions...

ikjadoon

ikjadoon

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jun 21, 2006
Messages
308
Hi! I'm upgrading to a larger hard drive. Currently, I have a Seagate 320GB 7200.10, but I am running out of space; currently, I have 17.5GB left and I had 26GB yesterday (HDTV DVR). So, I was thinking about getting a 500GB storage drive. But it was then that I realized that newer 500GB hard drives are actually faster than my Seagate. So, I am going to get this new 500GB, plop the TV Recordings on the 320GB, and put my OS and everything else on the 500GB. Then when the 320GB fills up, I will move the recording location to the 500GB. Or is that logic just stupid? I am planning to format, either way, anyways, so that shouldn't be part of the issue.

Also, I'm thinking about doing a JBOD, but can I "tell" it to put my OS and games on the 500GB? Or does it go in order, first filling up the 500GB then the 320GB? Can I tell it to do that?

I've got it pretty much narrowed down to these four drives:

Western Digital Caviar SE16 500GB

I hear Western Digital SE16's are good drives and it has good specs. Has a platter size of 125GB. It only has, however, 16MB of cache.

Seagate 7200.11 500GB

This one has the best specs on paper, but that may vary from what it gets in real-world testing: 250GB platter size, 32MB of cache, 5-Year Warranty, etc.

Western Digital RE2 500GB

Another Western Digital. Has lower latency all-around compared to the other drives. Also has a platter size of 125GB, but only 16MB of cache.

Hitachi Ultrastar 500GB

I know crap about this drive. The specs look nice, however: 32MB of cache and a slightly lower than average latency.

That's all. Here are some benchmarks; they seem to favor the RE2, but they are all 1TB versions. Not sure how that will affect the benchmarks. I grabbed the platter sizes from this site, too, so they might actually be different for these 500GB drives versus their 1TB.

TechReport

Thanks!

~Ibrahim~
 
Actually, the WD5000AAKS has 3 platters at 166 GB each. The WD5000KS is the older one with 4 platters at 125 GB. Go for that one, I have 4 of them in a RAID 5 NAS setup and 1 in my PC while I await Raptor RMA. They perform very well, in my opinion.
 
If you have 2 hard drives in JBOD, you pick which HD you want to install the OS when you install the os. After that you can put all your media on your second hd, and if you're recording tv shows you can usually tell the program which hd to record to. I can vouch for the WD Caviar SE16, they're quiet and cool, and of course fast. If I were in your shoes though, I'd go with which one I could find cheaper when I go to buy it, the WD or the Seagate. And just an fyi, the RE2 wd is a RAID drive, not that it's a bad thing, but I wouldn't choose it over the others.
 
the 7k500 were performance leaders for a while. From what I can see over at SR, the 7k1000 may be quite hard to beat.
 
Thanks for the replies, mate.

How much does platter size/count really matter? I was under the impression fewer heads = faster drive. Yet, the Seagate is getting smacked around by the 3+ platter drives over at TechReport.

@Cyrilix

That is one of main reasons I'm leaning towards a Western Digital, because I haven't heard hardly any bad rap about them.

Well, maddude, doesn't a JBOD make two single drives into one logical drives? How could I tell Windows Media Center to save to the "other" drive when only one shows up? I hope I'm not sounding rude, I just don't understand. I can see, however, how I could tell it to put the O/S on the 500GB...

Price isn't too much of a problem; as long as it isn't over $150 I should be good.

Eghad, that Hitachi drive is driving me nuts! I can't find a single review of it, yet it looks perfect. :mad:

Thanks!

~Ibrahim~
 
OK, I found a fact sheet on Hitachi's web site, but I can't make much sense of it:

Ultrastar A7K1000

I think it has 3 platters. Not sure. If it helps, :D!

~Ibrahim~
 
I have 2 hd's setup as JBOD, and that's what they are, I see them as 2 separate drives. Now this is a bit tricky for me, because I've heard others say what you're saying, but I think you have to set them up that way in in windows, to be seen as just 1 logical drive. These are the 2 drives I have on a separate rocketraid controller, but I don't think that should matter. Of course, now I have to reboot and get back into the raid settings to take a look, and no offense taken. :p

In the meantime, if anyone else can shed some light, thank you!

Edit:
Update, yes what I said holds true. I have both disks set up as JBOD and I have each formated as a primary partition. But still, if someone has anything to add, please do!
 
Ah....I get it now. I'll have to cook up my motherboard manual on how to set up a JBOD.

One last question. If they show up as two separate drives, what exactly is the point of a JBOD? Isn't that just like having two separate drives with no JBOD?

~Ibrahim~
 
I was always under the impression that JBOD was to have 2 separate drives, I dunno.
 
Hmm...This is what I thought JBOD was (Wikipedia):

Concatenation or Spanning of disks is not one of the numbered RAID levels, but it is a popular method for combining multiple physical disk drives into a single virtual disk. It provides no data redundancy. As the name implies, disks are merely concatenated together, end to beginning, so they appear to be a single large disk. This mode is sometimes called JBOD, or "Just a Bunch Of Disks".

Concatenation may be thought of as the reverse of partitioning. Whereas partitioning takes one physical drive and creates two or more logical drives, JBOD uses two or more physical drives to create one logical drive.

In that it consists of an array of independent disks, it can be thought of as a distant relation to RAID. Concatenation is sometimes used to turn several odd-sized drives into one larger useful drive, which cannot be done with RAID 0. For example, JBOD could combine 3 GB, 15 GB, 5.5 GB, and 12 GB drives into a logical drive at 35.5 GB, which is often more useful than the individual drives separately.

In the diagram to the right, data are concatenated from the end of disk 0 (block A63) to the beginning of disk 1 (block A64); end of disk 1 (block A91) to the beginning of disk 2 (block A92). If RAID 0 were used, then disk 0 and disk 2 would be truncated to 28 blocks, the size of the smallest disk in the array (disk 1) for a total size of 84 blocks.

~Ibrahim~
 
I don't think I could quantify the difference in number of platters and platter density with a simple formula, so I won't try -- the best information comes from reviews (which you seem to have read many of) and personal experience.

That said, I'm not sure if the Hitachi Deskstar 1 TB is any different from the Ultrastar you posted, but AFAIK, Hitachi 1 TB = 4x250 GB, and all the 750 GB drives that I know of are 4x188 GB. Correct if wrong.

ikjadoon said:
Thanks for the replies, mate.

How much does platter size/count really matter? I was under the impression fewer heads = faster drive. Yet, the Seagate is getting smacked around by the 3+ platter drives over at TechReport.

@Cyrilix

That is one of main reasons I'm leaning towards a Western Digital, because I haven't heard hardly any bad rap about them.

Well, maddude, doesn't a JBOD make two single drives into one logical drives? How could I tell Windows Media Center to save to the "other" drive when only one shows up? I hope I'm not sounding rude, I just don't understand. I can see, however, how I could tell it to put the O/S on the 500GB...

Price isn't too much of a problem; as long as it isn't over $150 I should be good.

Eghad, that Hitachi drive is driving me nuts! I can't find a single review of it, yet it looks perfect. :mad:

Thanks!

~Ibrahim~
Click to expand...
 
Blasted. OK. So, I'm currently leaning towards the RE2 WD, even with its 'meager' 16MB of cache because the 1TB is kicking arse in that review, besting the Raptor in a few tests, too!

~Ibrahim~
 
ikjadoon said:
Blasted. OK. So, I'm currently leaning towards the RE2 WD, even with its 'meager' 16MB of cache because the 1TB is kicking arse in that review, besting the Raptor in a few tests, too!

~Ibrahim~
Click to expand...

It is my opinion that those drives are too expensive, being advertised for the enterprise market rather than the home consumer market, and while they claim that the WD5000AAKS may have problems with RAID, my setup hasn't, so maybe I'm just lucky, or my hardware is compatible with each other, but I'd advise those instead.
 
ikjadoon said:
Thanks for the replies, mate.

How much does platter size/count really matter? I was under the impression fewer heads = faster drive. Yet, the Seagate is getting smacked around by the 3+ platter drives over at TechReport.
Click to expand...
All else equal, fewer platters implies a higher data density implying a higher STR. However it is possible that higher data densities come with drawbacks, if the disk cannot `lock on' well: analysis by hjreggel.
 
The WD 500GB AAKS drive is awesome value for money.
Its incredibly fast for a single drive and costs so little, I'm stunned!

My SATA chipset is old with a max burst of 150MB/s.
This drive gives me the following stats using HDTune:

Max sustained 83.9MB/s
Min sustained 38.3MB/s
Avg sustained 65.6MB/s
Burst 117 MB/s

Those with a SATA 3.0Gbit/s controller should see around 90MB/s sustained max and a much higher burst rate.
For the same money as a Raptor RAID array, you can have way more of these drives giving a huge array and a massive sustained transfer rate!

Seek times wont be quite as good Raptors but RAID diminishes the advantage of faster seek times by having to wait for all drives to reach a particular point in the spin before data is transferred.
If you need fastest seek times, you will need the Raptors or SCSI otherwise these 500GB drives are immense value by giving huge space/data transfer rates for comparatively little outlay.

UK price is currently £62 for the 500GB drive (silly cheap for over here), I'm not sure about US prices.
 
Nenu said:
The WD 500GB AAKS drive is awesome value for money.
Its incredibly fast for a single drive and costs so little, I'm stunned!

My SATA chipset is old with a max burst of 150MB/s.
This drive gives me the following stats using HDTune:

Max sustained 83.9MB/s
Min sustained 38.3MB/s
Avg sustained 65.6MB/s
Burst 117 MB/s

Those with a SATA 3.0Gbit/s controller should see around 90MB/s sustained max and a much higher burst rate.
For the same money as a Raptor RAID array, you can have way more of these drives giving a huge array and a massive sustained transfer rate!

Seek times wont be quite as good Raptors but RAID diminishes the advantage of faster seek times by having to wait for all drives to reach a particular point in the spin before data is transferred.
If you need fastest seek times, you will need the Raptors or SCSI otherwise these 500GB drives are immense value by giving huge space/data transfer rates for comparatively little outlay.

UK price is currently £62 for the 500GB drive (silly cheap for over here), I'm not sure about US prices.
Click to expand...

There's no way that's true. You won't see 90 MB/s with even a Raptor. Sorry, but from everything I've seen, that's false. Please provide some proof or else I'll have to discredit this right away. 65-66 MB/s is the approximate correct average speed.
 
Didn't the Samsung Spinpoint 500GB drive do pretty well in benchies? I've failed to see it mentioned here..
 
@ Cyrilix

I don't want to sound rude, but these Seagate 7200.11 drives are getting extremely close to that "90MB/s" sustained rate you might be talking about:

Courtesy of that TechReport link I posted earlier:

hdtach-read.gif


hdtach-write.gif


hdtach-burst.gif


Of course, the Raptor beat all in the random access time by a good 4-5ms, but these graphs speak for themselves.

Am I confusing sustained with average, however?

In the graphs, Jayp, I don't see the Spinpoint T doing so hot, yet this may be an earlier model.

~Ibrahim~
 
Cyrilix said:
There's no way that's true. You won't see 90 MB/s with even a Raptor. Sorry, but from everything I've seen, that's false. Please provide some proof or else I'll have to discredit this right away. 65-66 MB/s is the approximate correct average speed.
Click to expand...

my average speed on my WD500AAKS is about 78mb/s 0.0 using hd-tune.

with HD Tach I did my raptor raid yesterday
Average WriteSped is 160MB/S
Average Seektime is 8.3
Burst is 240mb/s

I have a 32m cache 7200.11 500gb I'm going to install today
 
Digital Viper-X- said:
my average speed on my WD500AAKS is about 78mb/s 0.0 using hd-tune.

with HD Tach I did my raptor raid yesterday
Average WriteSped is 160MB/S
Average Seektime is 8.3
Burst is 240mb/s

I have a 32m cache 7200.11 500gb I'm going to install today
Click to expand...

HD Tach and HD Tune have a fairly consistent performance difference for STR, potentially due to the way that they measure it. One is always ~10% faster (and I forget which one), so I don't doubt your claim, however, 90 is too far off from this margin of error. Also, you seem to indicate you get 160 MB/s writes with a single drive? There must be a mistake somewhere. Even the MTRON 7000 SSD won't get those kinds of speeds, read or write.

Edit: ikjadoon, thanks for the graphs, however, I do believe we were talking about the WD5000AAKS, which in your graph shows 62.x MB/s and 61.x MB/s (read/write).
 
Cyrilix said:
HD Tach and HD Tune have a fairly consistent performance difference for STR, potentially due to the way that they measure it. One is always ~10% faster (and I forget which one), so I don't doubt your claim, however, 90 is too far off from this margin of error. Also, you seem to indicate you get 160 MB/s writes with a single drive? There must be a mistake somewhere. Even the MTRON 7000 SSD won't get those kinds of speeds, read or write.

Edit: ikjadoon, thanks for the graphs, however, I do believe we were talking about the WD5000AAKS, which in your graph shows 62.x MB/s and 61.x MB/s (read/write).
Click to expand...

Sorry, I mean't Raptor Raid, R150X in raid 0, I never bothered getting the single for the raptors, just putting up a comparison for what Im going to bench tonight

so far
HD TACH
Raptor 150 Raid - 160MB/S STR
-nothing else tested wIth HDTAch till tonight

HD TUNE
Raptor 150 RAID - 140ish MB/S STR
WD500AAKS - 78 MB/S STR
Seagate 500 7200.10 - mid 6X MB/S(have 2)

Tonight, I'm putting up the 7200.10 and 7200.11 and the AAKS in for HD tach results

HDtach is always higher, specially on burst speed, its much higher, HDTune burst reports 163mb/s, HDTACH is 240+ MB/S on the same raptor raid.
 
Digital Viper-X- said:
Sorry, I mean't Raptor Raid, R150X in raid 0, I never bothered getting the single for the raptors, just putting up a comparison for what Im going to bench tonight

so far
HD TACH
Raptor 150 Raid - 160MB/S STR
-nothing else tested wIth HDTAch till tonight

HD TUNE
Raptor 150 RAID - 140ish MB/S STR
WD500AAKS - 78 MB/S STR
Seagate 500 7200.10 - mid 6X MB/S(have 2)

Tonight, I'm putting up the 7200.10 and 7200.11 and the AAKS in for HD tach results

HDtach is always higher, specially on burst speed, its much higher, HDTune burst reports 163mb/s, HDTACH is 240+ MB/S on the same raptor raid.
Click to expand...

Oh, I see. Very nice speeds.
 
JaYp146 said:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,123680-page,1/article.html
http://www.pcworld.com/product/specs/id,29742-c,harddrives/specs.html
Click to expand...

Another contender! The drive seems to be exchanging shots with the SE16 very nicely and the price isn't half-bad either. Heck, I paid there-abouts that much for my 320GB.

I have one fairly major question. In one generation, like 7200.11, is there much variance between the different capacities? Like the 500GB versus the 750GB versus the 1TB? I've just noticed that many hard drive reviewers use any size capacity when comparing hard drive generations; is that really a good idea?

I am not planning RAID or enterprise solutions, but it is rather hard to ignore the RE2 getting top marks in almost every test at Tech Report.

Digital-Viper: could you do me a semi-big favor for me? Could you "bench" the 7200.11 and see how it performs versus the 7200.10 and the Raptor RAID 0 and the AAKS, too? Thanks!

I would like to make one thing clear: between the different WDs, I am currently looking at the SE16 and the RE2. The SE16 = WD5000AAKS, correct?

So far, this is my list of the my favorite drives so far:

1. Western Digital RE2 500GB tied with Seagate 7200.11 500GB
2. Western Digital SE16 500GB
3. Samsung Spinpoint 500GB
4. Hitachi Ultrastar A7K1000 (If no new [or any] info comes in out this drive, I'm dropping it)

~Ibrahim~
 
I'm planning on it tonight :) I havn't had a chance to install it yet the AAKS is in a usb case atm it's going back in though ,damn Vantec MX400 is way too loud

Also to note

the seagate 7200.10 are alot louder when accessing the drive, but they spin much quieter compared to the WD 500AAKS
 
You're amazing... :D

OK, so it isn't just me. I have the 320GB is a hard drive cage with vibration dampening, but the seek overpowers all ten fans.

~Ibrahim~
 
ikjadoon said:
You're amazing... :D

OK, so it isn't just me. I have the 320GB is a hard drive cage with vibration dampening, but the seek overpowers all ten fans.

~Ibrahim~
Click to expand...

lol yea seagates are loud 0.0 not sure why so much louder then WD / old Maxtors,

but the Raptors are just as loud I find it as the Seagates when reading / writing
 
Raptor 150 X raid vs 7200.11 32m 500GB Seagate
RaptorVs32M.jpg

7200.11 500GB 32m Vs WD 500AAKS
32Mvs16MWD.jpg

WD 500AAKS vs Seagate 8M 7200.10 500gb
WD16vs8M.jpg


I don't know if this makes any diff what so ever, but the 8m and 16m drives are almost full =p
 
Well, I think that seems to be rather conclusive. The Seagate 7200.11 is kicking butt and taking names. Consistently, it is faster than all the other drives (minus the RAID 0 and it doesn't come too far, either, in some places). I mean, in HD Tune, the Seagate's average is about what the WD's maximum was. And from what I can see, the 7200.11 has a tighter (and higher) range of speeds. The RE2 is just a tad bit faster than the AAKS, which would put it just as fast or possibly even a bit slower than the 7200.11.

I guess the 2x250GB platter + 32MB of cache really does help. Access time shaves a millisecond off the WD, too.

Did you have write-ahead cache enabled (advance performance under Device Manager) enabled or disabled?

The 7200.11 has gained big steps today. I just want one little teeny review of it and not its 1TB/750GB brother to confirm these findings. Not that I don't trust you, but a second opinion never hurts.

:)

~Ibrahim~
 
ikjadoon said:
Well, I think that seems to be rather conclusive. The Seagate 7200.11 is kicking butt and taking names. Consistently, it is faster than all the other drives (minus the RAID 0 and it doesn't come too far, either, in some places). I mean, in HD Tune, the Seagate's average is about what the WD's maximum was. And from what I can see, the 7200.11 has a tighter (and higher) range of speeds. The RE2 is just a tad bit faster than the AAKS, which would put it just as fast or possibly even a bit slower than the 7200.11.

I guess the 2x250GB platter + 32MB of cache really does help. Access time shaves a millisecond off the WD, too.

Did you have write-ahead cache enabled (advance performance under Device Manager) enabled or disabled?

The 7200.11 has gained big steps today. I just want one little teeny review of it and not its 1TB/750GB brother to confirm these findings. Not that I don't trust you, but a second opinion never hurts.

:)

~Ibrahim~
Click to expand...

Unfortunately, Seagate drives tend to be loud and noisy, otherwise I'd be all over it.
 
Exactly! What is the point of all the undervolted fans and dampening rubber washers if the annoying hard drive seek overpowers it all? I will message my maker, Overdrive PC, to see if they have any opinion/solution on the issue, as they pride themselves in building quiet machines.

~Ibrahim~
 
it was disabled on both drives, running it again with it enabled now


yea it makes no diff, same numbers with the feature enabled

btw, the 32m 7200.11 is silent compared to previous seagate drives! MUCH quieter
 
Cyrilix said:
There's no way that's true. You won't see 90 MB/s with even a Raptor. Sorry, but from everything I've seen, that's false. Please provide some proof or else I'll have to discredit this right away. 65-66 MB/s is the approximate correct average speed.
Click to expand...

Umm please read again
Nenu said:
Avg sustained 65.6MB/s
Click to expand...
quoted from the post you replied to!!

The rest is true too, take it or leave it.
 
So after reading all of this greatness about the 7200.11, I went off to do my own research and found this review by TechReport which reviews the latest 7200.11. The conclusion is not pretty. While it scores very nicely in HDTach and leads by quite a margin, in the real world performance tests, it only fairs about average or a bit better than average with the exception of specific ISO tests. On the other hand, the noise level seems to be very good, somewhere in between the WD5000AAKS and WD7500AAKS, so at least that's something to look forward to. If we're recommending 500 GB drives, it's a bit of a toss-up between the WD5000AAKS/RE2 and the Seagate 7200.11 series (the one in the review was the 1 TB model, lower sized models won't perform any better, but shouldn't perform worse, if they follow the same specs). If you want a larger drive though, I'd still take the WD7500AAKS anyday of the week. It scores consistently well in every benchmark, always at the top or near the top.

My final conclusion is, WD definitely has more consistency and real-world performance than the Seagates, so my bet is still on WD.

Here is the review link, for your perusal: Review

Edit: More browsing has brought along another review, this time of the ES.2, Seagate's enterprise counterpart of the 7200.11. Again, the results are disappointing, despite the good standing with STR and iPeak benchmarks. Everything else looks terrible. ES.2 Review Here.
 
MassiveOverkill said:
7200.11 500 gig (striped size is 200 gig):

HDTune.jpg


7200.10 200 gig striped:

HDTune2.jpg
Click to expand...

wtf? that array eats my raptors for dinner
how is the access time so low on the 7200.11 stried array, it should be higher then a single drive, and 1338mb/s burst :|? that's not even possible on sata 3g. are you using 4 drives or 2?
 
2 drives on Matrix RAID for the 7200.11s and then 2 drives on striped only RAID for the 700.10s

They're the Taiwan-made drives. I got a 3rd 7200.11 for a customer built in China and it's single drive performance doesn't seem all that great. I also flashed that one to the newer firmware.
 
MassiveOverkill said:
2 drives on Matrix RAID for the 7200.11s and then 2 drives on striped only RAID for the 700.10s

They're the Taiwan-made drives. I got a 3rd 7200.11 for a customer built in China and it's single drive performance doesn't seem all that great. I also flashed that one to the newer firmware.
Click to expand...


sorry I'm a newb, what is the diff between matrix raid, and just raid?
 
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