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Seagate Barracuda 7200.8: 400GBs with NCQ

 by Purav Sanghani on April 20, 2005 4:30 PM EST
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Overall System Performance - SYSMark 2004

SYSMark 2004 is divided into two separate suites: Internet Content Creation and Office Productivity. What makes SYSMark an ideal hard disk benchmark is that its scores are totals of response times, meaning that the benchmark measures how long the system takes to respond to a task (e.g. how long before a search and replace is completed after it is initiated) and sums up all such response times to generate a score. This score is generated for six total subcategories: three under Internet Content Creation and three under Office Productivity.

For the most part, SYSMark is CPU/platform bound, but we will see some variations in performance according to disk speed. At the same time, there are a couple of benchmarks within SYSMark that are heavily disk dependent.

Internet Content Creation Performance

Our results showed very little difference in the performance of the competitors; not enough to rule out margin of error in the Content Creation part of SYSMark 2004. The scores for the majority of drives landed between 180-183, which does not illustrate too well the drive that performs better than the rest.

Office Productivity Performance

SYSMark's Office Productivity suite consists of three tests, the first of which is the Communication test. The Communication test consists of the following:
"The user receives an email in Outlook 2002 that contains a collection of documents in a zip file. The user reviews his email and updates his calendar while VirusScan 7.0 scans the system. The corporate web site is viewed in Internet Explorer 6.0. Finally, Internet Explorer is used to look at samples of the web pages and documents created during the scenario."

SYSMark 2004

Though SYSMark 2004 contains two other tests in its Office Productivity benchmarks, we saw very little difference when testing the hard disk drives, since Document Creation and Data Analysis are more dependant on the CPU rather than hard disk speed.

The Communication test, on the other hand, is disk dependant, which shows in our results. With Western Digital's Raptor ruling the charts so far, the 400GB 7200.8 just can't seem to keep up with the other drives in this scenario, coming in at 7th place, below the 120GB 7200.7 with a score of 182.

Overall System Performance - Winstone 2004 SYSMark 2004 Performance Summary
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  • AtaStrumf - Thursday, April 21, 2005 - link

    #29 - I found a similar test that includes a WD Caviar drive and from what I can tell it is not exactly lagging.

    http://www.storagereview.com/articles/200504/20050...

  • Calin - Thursday, April 21, 2005 - link

    In "WinBench99" page, you said "The Disk Transfer Rate test reads from the media in a linear fashion from the beginning (inner tracks) to the end (outer tracks)". It's false, the hard drives have the beginning tracks on the outside (well, exterior) of the platters, and the inner drives in the interior part. The reason is that while stationary, the read heads stay outside of the media, and they will reach the outer tracks sooner. Also, on the outer tracks the data density is increased, so the data read and write speed is increased also.

  • emboss - Thursday, April 21, 2005 - link

    I'd say you need to ditch Winbench 99 for transfer tests. It's physically impossible for drives to have the same transfer rate on the inside and outside of the platters. Not to mention that the ONLY drives that showed this behaviour were NCQ drives. I suspect what is happening is that the NCQ reordering is stuffing things up by reading the data out-of-order, and that the reordering process delivers the data in one (or several) burst blocks that do not correspond to the real transfer rate off the platters. Maybe HDTach might return more sensible numbers.

  • Lonyo - Thursday, April 21, 2005 - link

    Are you going to do some more HDD/NCQ testing when we get more dual core CPU's to test in multi-taking situations?
    The recent article on the Pentium D shows the benefits of NCQ combined with a dual core CPU (the single core CPU's didn't really show any improvement), so are you going to go more in depth hopefully soon (after you can publish results of AMD X2 CPU's)?

    http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?...
    http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?...

  • jm20 - Thursday, April 21, 2005 - link

    How is the 7200.7 120Gb drive louder then a Raptor? My 7200.7 120Gb drive is near SILENT, no where loud as a Raptor. I think your measuring device is off forthe Acoustics test.

  • segagenesis - Thursday, April 21, 2005 - link

    #20 - Thats easy. Ignoring the Raptor they are lagging behind on the consumer front compared to others. Last I checked they still charge a fair amount extra for a drive with a FDB motor. The performance just hasnt been up to par either. The days when the "Special Edition" drives were great are gone.

  • Palek - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link

    Purav, you did not explain why you chose to test with an nForce chipset over a chipset from intel.

    For one thing, nVidia's ATA controllers/drivers have a fairly poor track record. I still remember the multitude of problems that cropped up when people installed nVidia ATA drivers on their nForce2 motherboards. I run my nForce2-based computer with MS ATA drivers because I am too afraid that the nVidia drivers will wreck my system (that, and ExactAudioCopy does not recognize any optical drives with the nVidia drivers installed). Admittedly, these issues were driver-related, but then nVidia's checkered past does not boost my confidence in their ability to provide an nForce4 driver that actually works according to spec. Maybe we're seeing no boost with NCQ because of poor implementation, who knows. Testing with just one platform will not reveal such issues.

    Also, among other things intel is known for their rock-solid and impressively fast ATA controllers, so an intel chipset would be the obvious platform of choice for testing such new technologies as NCQ.

  • erwos - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link

    "It's mentioned in the article that all of the 7200.8 drives use a 3x133gb platter configuration."

    This actually isn't true, from what I've read elsewhere. Read the following at StorageReview:
    http://www.storagereview.com/articles/200504/20050...

    It makes a lot more sense than the "leftover space" theorem.

    -Erwos

  • quorm - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link

    xsilver, the drive is not "guaranteed reliable." The only warranty is that if it breaks within five years, they will repair/replace it. There is a possibility that data can be lost from any portion of the drive. You have no way of knowing whether this additional space, if accessible, would be any less reliable than the rest of the drive. Yes, modifying the drive would probably void the warranty, but I'm wondering if Seagate is selling software-limited, yet physically identical drives at different prices, much like with ATI's 9500/9700.

  • Zar0n - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link

    With NCQ on u get worst results than with it off.
    This may be good at servers, but no good at desktop.
    I’ll say its bad implemented but, all drivers seem to suffer.
    So no NCQ for me...
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