Seagate 2 TB Drives

[truffle00]

How are these things? Are people seeing the same kind of problems that they did with the 1.5 TB drives? Hell, does anyone actually own one?

I've been pretty loyal to Seagate, but admittedly, have not owned anything past their 1 TB drives. They haven't failed me yet, so I see myself sticking with the brand. I've been looking to move my 5x750 GB array to a 5x2TB array, and have been waiting for the Seagate drives. It sucks that they aren't 7200 RPM but I only use them for storage, and I'm sure in RAID 5 they're fast enough to max out my Gb connection. And if anything, at 5900 RPM they'll probably run cooler than my current drives in the same enclosure, so I don't think that I really mind the lower RPM.

Anyway, I just hadn't seen any posts regarding these drives. Can anyone who has one share some insight? Bonus points if you have them in a RAID config...

 

[veritas7]

There are 7200 RPM 2TB Seagates.

However, you cannot buy them OEM, they are currently present in Seagate's Desk and XTreme external hard drive models.

They have pretty varied write speeds, but there are a few theories out there why they are.

Lets just say Seagate put them in (slow) externals for a reason...

Edit: 5900RPM versions have somewhat sluggish write speeds (not bad), but with benchmarking tools, you have to rerun them a few times until the results become stable (I'm guessing "warming up" the air inside the drive).

 

[shady86]

The latest 7200.12 with CC44 firmware have 18-20ms seek which is comparable to 5900 or 5400 green drives. They are extremely quite though. Im not sure they are good enough to be system drive because of the terrible seek times. Maybe for storage if seek is not a problem.

 

[vischo]

How are these things?

I've been pretty loyal to Seagate,

Same here and I've been wanting to know the same. I own (2) 1.5TB in my WHS that haven't given me issues, yet. But I have been seriously considering looking at Western Digital for future purchases.

 

[veritas7]

The latest 7200.12 with CC44 firmware have 18-20ms seek which is comparable to 5900 or 5400 green drives. They are extremely quite though. Im not sure they are good enough to be system drive because of the terrible seek times. Maybe for storage if seek is not a problem.

I found the same issue. Also, it appears the XTreme version is running firmware CC83, not CC84 (which all the Desk versions are running). I can't tell if the firmware is based on the date, or depending on the interface of which the enclosures they were put in to (Desk=USB2.0, XTreme=eSATA&Firewire400[and 800 iirc? can't be sure]).

 

[truffle00]

Edit: 5900RPM versions have somewhat sluggish write speeds (not bad), but with benchmarking tools, you have to rerun them a few times until the results become stable (I'm guessing "warming up" the air inside the drive).

The latest 7200.12 with CC44 firmware have 18-20ms seek which is comparable to 5900 or 5400 green drives. They are extremely quite though. Im not sure they are good enough to be system drive because of the terrible seek times. Maybe for storage if seek is not a problem.

They will not be used for system drives, and will be put into a hardware 5x2 TB RAID 5 array. I transfer to the array over a single Gb connection, so as long as I can get 90 MB/sec writes out of the whole thing I'll be happy.