Seagate 7200.9 500GB: Mouthwatering Benchmarks
by Purav Sanghani on October 24, 2005 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
The Test
Our test bed specs have been laid out below. Since our test bed has remained untouched from our look at Seagate's 400GB Barracuda article, we will include our results of the drives that we looked at then.
Our test bed:
AMD Athlon 64 3500+ (2.2Ghz)
Giga-byte GA-K8NXP-SLI
Western Digital WD1600JS
NVIDIA 6600GT SLI Edition (single 128MB card)
1GB (512MBx2) Corsair XMS4400
Our motherboard is an nForce4 based board that features support for the SATA II standard, up to 3Gbps/sec SATA transfer rates, and NCQ and TCQ.
We used the following nForce platform drivers in conjunction with our testbed:
nForce4 Chipset Driver 6.66
Nvidia graphics driver 71.89
Windows XP SP2 w/out further updates
More details about each individual test will appear in the section of the review dedicated to that particular test.
The 7200.9 Series
Our test bed specs have been laid out below. Since our test bed has remained untouched from our look at Seagate's 400GB Barracuda article, we will include our results of the drives that we looked at then.
Our test bed:
AMD Athlon 64 3500+ (2.2Ghz)
Giga-byte GA-K8NXP-SLI
Western Digital WD1600JS
NVIDIA 6600GT SLI Edition (single 128MB card)
1GB (512MBx2) Corsair XMS4400
Our motherboard is an nForce4 based board that features support for the SATA II standard, up to 3Gbps/sec SATA transfer rates, and NCQ and TCQ.
We used the following nForce platform drivers in conjunction with our testbed:
nForce4 Chipset Driver 6.66
Nvidia graphics driver 71.89
Windows XP SP2 w/out further updates
| AnandTech Storage Tests | |
| Business Winstone IPEAK | a playback test of all of the IO operations that occur within Business Winstone 2004 |
| Content Creation IPEAK | a playback test of all of the IO operations that occur within Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004 |
| SYSMark 2004 | the official SYSMark 2004 test suite |
| Business Winstone 2004 | the official Business Winstone 2004 test suite |
| Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004 | the official Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004 test suite |
| Half-Life 2 Level Load Test | Half-Life 2 level load time test |
| Doom 3 Level Load Test | Doom 3 level load time test |
| Command & Conquer: Generals Level Load Test | Command & Conquer: Generals level load time test |
| Real World File System Task Tests | timed tests of basic file system tasks including zipping/unzipping and copying files |
| HDTach | Synthetic test for transfer rate of hard disk during a full disk read |
| Service Time and Transfer Rate Tests | Synthetic tests for average service time and transfer rate of hard disk during a full disk read |
| Business Winstone 2004 Multitasking Test | Synthetic tests for overall system multitasking performance |
| Real World Multitasking Test | timed tests of basic multitasking processes, timing a file zip operation while importing Outlook data |
More details about each individual test will appear in the section of the review dedicated to that particular test.
The 7200.9 Series
| Capacity | Platter Density | # of Platters/ Heads | Spindle speed (RPM) | Average Seek Time | Average Latency | Interface | Buffer Sizes |
| 40GB | 80GB | 1 / 1 | 7200 | 8.9ms | 4.16ms | PATA / SATA | 2MB |
| 80GB | 160 GB | 1 / 1 | 7200 | 8.9 ms | 4.16ms | PATA / SATA | 2, 8MB |
| 120GB | 120GB | 1 / 2 | 7200 | 8.5ms | 4.16ms | PATA / SATA | 2, 8MB |
| 160GB | 160GB | 1 / 2 | 7200 | 8.5ms | 4.16ms | PATA / SATA | 2, 8MB |
| 200GB | 100GB | 2 / 4 | 7200 | 8.5ms | 4.16ms | PATA / SATA | 8MB |
| 250GB | 125GB | 2 / 4 | 7200 | 8.5ms | 4.16ms | PATA / SATA | 8MB |
| 300GB | 100GB | 3 / 6 | 7200 | 8.5ms | 4.16ms | PATA / SATA | 16MB |
| 400GB | 133GB | 3 / 6 | 7200 | 8.5ms | 4.16ms | PATA / SATA | 16MB |
| 500GB | 125GB | 4 / 8 | 7200 | 8.5ms | 4.16ms | PATA / SATA | 16MB |
The 500GB 7200.9
Click for high resolution version.
The Circuitry
Click for high resolution version.
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46 Comments
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jeffrey - Monday, October 24, 2005 - link
I agree, the 160gb would have been a good review due to the platter density. The 400gb would have been a good review due to the combination of higher density and higher cache.A true Anandtech Quality article needs not only to be a report, but an inquisition.
Great review idea:
160gb drive 160gb platters 8mb cache
400gb drive 133gb platters 16mb cache
500gb drive 125gb platters 16mb cache
The way I see it the perfect follow-up is already 1/3 done.
Nighteye2 - Monday, October 24, 2005 - link
Did anyone else notices how the load times in bold print for both Word 2003 and Photoshop CS are not the minimum load times of all drives tested?Lord Zado - Monday, October 24, 2005 - link
Yeah, I noticed that as well. Was coming here to make that same comment.PuravSanghani - Monday, October 24, 2005 - link
I got a bit happy with the bold button with the Sox in the World Series! This has been fixed.Lonyo - Monday, October 24, 2005 - link
It says evaluation version for non commercial use only in the SS of the HD Tach titelbar, are you guys doing osmething illegal?I'd call Anandtech a commercial venture :P
mongoosesRawesome - Monday, October 24, 2005 - link
Good eyes.Basilisk - Monday, October 24, 2005 - link
Last paragraph of article: why on Earth is "cost-effective" linked to M$ Retail Management System Solutions? Or, for that matter, why is "Western-Digital" linked to Yahoo!! Shopping (as opposed to AT Shopping) in a sentence unrelated to pricing? Curiouser and curiouser....KristopherKubicki - Monday, October 24, 2005 - link
It's some ad thing called intelitext. It sucks. Click here to disable it:http://www.anandtech.com/siteinfo.aspx?intelli=y">http://www.anandtech.com/siteinfo.aspx?intelli=y
Kristopher
kd4yum - Thursday, October 27, 2005 - link
Thanks, KrisAnemone - Monday, October 24, 2005 - link
I've had dozens of WD drives over the years and only 2 (1 was 10+ years old, the other a 6mo old raptor) have ever gone bad. I've killed several IBM drives and a couple Maxtor's along the way.The raptor is really noticeably faster in day to day use than any other drive I've seen in action. The tests really don't tell the entire story. With several of the drives in my systems virus scans have gone from a couple hours down to 20-30min. It's really that noticeable. What I'd like to see on that front however is for WD to up the drive to 148mb, bring us a genuine native NCQ, and SATA II. The last two features just to bring it up to date, since I'm not yet convinced they make a stunning difference in performance. SATA II may be a technology that will serve better when all drives are 10k standard and raptor types are 15k, meaning when the native ability of the drive itself begins to get a bit better.
Thanks for the detailed review!