just ordered seagate having doubts

[JDCentral]

stay with the seagate!

;-)

 

[akugami]

Originally posted by: Pariah

Originally posted by: DerelictDev
SATAII is pointless (A 300mb pipe while itll only hit ~70mb max), Seagates are also quiet, and i doubt you would see the performance difference between a seagate and hitachi in a real situation, so stop thinking and just leave it be.

Depends on what the drive will be used for and how perceptive you are about the performance of your computer. I bought a 300GB Barracuda 7200.9 recently and when I initially installed it and started transfering data to it, I thought something was wrong because it was taking so long. After further testing, there was nothing wrong with it, it was simply that slow. Since I only planned to use it for storage, speed wasn't an issue, but if I was planning to use it for a boot drive, the poor performance (likely the result of the putrid access time) it has would have persuaded me to return it for something else.

I agree SATA II is not a reason to switch though.

First, the Seagate 7200.8's and the 7200.9's have a 8ms access time. Second, I was under the 7200.9 wasn't suppose to be released until Fall 2005 at the earliest so it's not out yet. It's going to have 16MB cache and top out at 500GB. Third, even the older 7200.7's have an 8.5ms access time so I don't see the new drives getting slower by a 2x margin.

So I'm wondering how the heck you were able to buy a Seagate 7200.9 drive when it's not released and why would Seagate release a drive with 16ms access time which is horribly slow compared to their last two generation of HD's.

I have a Seagate 400GB 7200.8 drive and it's very quiet. I'm happy with the drive's performance. I like the peace of mind having Seagate's 5 year warranty backing up my drive because that means they are much more concerned with building quality drives. The less RMA's they have for repairs, the less it cost them to support the products. Especially with a 5 year warranty as opposed to the now industry standard of 3 years.

 

[mauiblue]

Originally posted by: JDCentral
stay with the seagate!

;-)

Originally posted by: Waylay00
Seagate and Western Digital are the two best HDD manufacturers in my opinion. I've never had a problem with either.

I've only owned Western Digital (internal) and Seagate (external) and they have performed well over the six years I've owned them. I had only one hard drive (Western Digital) fail on me and that one lasted five years.

 

[w00t]

i kinda want Samsung Spinpoint P series for quietness.

how much quieter do you think a samsung spinpoint p series ata150 80gig is than a seagate 80gig ata150?

 

[beach2nd]

Go with the seagate. I swear by them.

 

[JBT]

I would pick Seagate above either of those drivesanyways. Its a great mix of speed and quietness. Ontop of that a 5 year warrenty is always nice. Even if you think you won't use the drive that long. If its 200-300 GB's are you really just going to throw it out???

 

[w00t]

ur wish is my command well really newegg's they wouldnt let me change she said i could restock it for free she said she wanted to see my pic 1st and than she said she would copy down my address i dont know what that is about lol jk but she said it has been shipped already and they cant do anything but she did say she said i wouldnt have to pay restock fee but i just said i will keept he seagate.

 

[w00t]

Originally posted by: JBT
I would pick Seagate above either of those drivesanyways. Its a great mix of speed and quietness. Ontop of that a 5 year warrenty is always nice. Even if you think you won't use the drive that long. If its 200-300 GB's are you really just going to throw it out???

i would never be able to use 300gb's ever in my life i have a hard time using 10gigs. i am too clean about my computer its sad right now i am using 4.39 that is with all shuttle bios and drivers.

 

[Pariah]

First, the Seagate 7200.8's and the 7200.9's have a 8ms access time. Second, I was under the 7200.9 wasn't suppose to be released until Fall 2005 at the earliest so it's not out yet. It's going to have 16MB cache and top out at 500GB. Third, even the older 7200.7's have an 8.5ms access time so I don't see the new drives getting slower by a 2x margin.

Yes, I made a mistake on the model number. It is in fact a 7200.8. You are correct on that one, too bad you spent the rest of the post proving model numbers are the only thing you understand about hard drives.

Seagate's have a claimed average seek time of 8.0ms. This is NOT the same as access time. You have to add average latency to average seek to calculate average access time. Average latency for a 7200RPM drives is 4.17ms added to 8.0ms gives a claimed average access time of 12.17ms. The reason why I say claimed is because hard drives practically never perform as well as the spec, and Seagate in particular is notorious for not even coming close. Mine tests out around 15.7ms which makes it one of, if not the slowest desktop 7200RPM drive ever by average access time. Storage Review tested a SATA version of the drive and did slightly better, though not much:

Seagate Barracuda 7200.8: 15.0ms access time

"The Barracuda 7200.8 turns in a measured random access time of 15.0 milliseconds. Subtracting the standard 4.2 milliseconds to account for the rotational latency of a 7200 RPM spindle yields a net measured seek time of 10.8 milliseconds. While Seagate's claim of an 8 millisecond seek time is rather ambitious for an ATA drive, a measured score of nearly 11 ms is undeniably lethargic by any measure."

To give you an idea how slow that is, 15.0ms is the 4th slowest drive SR has tested in their almost 4 year old testbed, and is slower than some 5400RPM ATA drives they have tested. From SR's conclusion:

"Unfortunately, while the capacity is there, the performance is not. The 7200.8 lags significantly behind the latest offerings from Maxtor and Hitachi in both single-user and multi-user instances."

I hadn't read this review before I bought the drive, so I was unaware of the poor performance. But since I bought it for only storage and the price was good, the turtle speed doesn't matter to me.

The 7200.8 series is a slow drive by modern standards. Just because you seem to be happy with the performance, doesn't mean the drive performs well.

 

[akugami]

Pariah.

Ok, I misread what you wrote (it happens) and was thinking of access times. I don't get as indepth on storage as I do when comparing other aspects of my computer. The only things I need to know is 1) reliability 2) performance compared to other drives in a similar category. For what you get from Seagate, the slight premium charged by them is well worth it since Seagate is one of the most reliable drive manufactorers and it has almost double the warranty as other HD's.

Now, you claimed it was slow but when you compare it to other drives in it's category, it's actually quite fast. Synthetic tests alone do not tell real world performance so I was quite surprised to see you claim that the 300GB 7200.8 drive you bought was so slow that you were wondering if somthing was wrong with it. I recently bought a 400GB 7200.8 and transferred 250GB from an older drive and it didn't feel any slower than any 200GB+ drive from Maxtor, WD and Seagate that I have used. Having 5 computers in and around the house with multiple hard drives in each, I do have a feel for performance in the real world.

By no means am I claiming it's the fastest drive I've used (my 74GB Raptor is my OS drive), just that I find it very surprising that you felt the drive was performing so slowly that it might have been defective. I do work with authoring DVD's so I do use it for large files and sometimes I have to re-encode or clean up audio files from these shows as well. I downloaded TV shows unavailable in the US that I re-encode and author to DVD for my parents to watch. Also download lots of Japanese animation unavailable in the US. So I'm not user to working with transferring large files between drives. I dare say that my HD use is more demanding than the average user. I find the Seagates have better reliability, having to RMA multiple Maxtor's already.

So the combination of reliability and pretty good performance versus price of the product is why I recommend Seagates. I've yet to see a benchmark that shows the Seagates as being vastly inferior to any SATA or PATA drive out there.