modifying 7200.11 1.5TB to beat velociraptor in speed

[biostud]

Interesting read:

http://www.techwarelabs.com/seagate_1-5tb-mod/

 

[MustISO]

I read about this a while ago. It does sound interesting but I have no tried it with my drives.

 

[biostud]

I just got one recently, but I prefer the space and then maybe a SSD down the road. Currently WinXP is running from an old 250gb harddrive with ~60mb/s read spead, so installing win7 on the the new 1.5TB drive should be a significant improvement even without this mod.

 

[Denithor]

The fact that the modified 1.5TB drive cannot keep pace with the VR in the 4K random write test is the single drawback. Unfortunately that is the performance factor that has the most impact on system "feel" and why SSD drives are viewed as being so much faster than traditional drives.

I wonder if you could get this same performance boost by modding a 640GB drive into 300GB?

 

[dawza]

You can short-stroke all you want, but access time on a 7200RPM HDD is never going to approach that of a 10K RPM HDD.

 

[Nothinman]

And reducing the capacity by 1.2TB seems extremely stupid regardless of the speed increase.

 

[Relion]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
And reducing the capacity by 1.2TB seems extremely stupid regardless of the speed increase.

Not really. if a real 10K RPM is achieved....A 300GB velociraptor is what...200 bucks ? You d be getting it for just $100.

 

[therealnickdanger]

Short-stroking is pretty dang cool, no doubt. However, I would rather spend $200 on a X-25M G2 to get a real speed advantage.

 

[Spikesoldier]

just get a ssd and be floored with it

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

I don't understand why you need to mess around with the drive's firmware. Why not just create a small partition at the beginning of the disk and leave the rest unused?

 

[Sahakiel]

Originally posted by: BingBongWongFooey
I don't understand why you need to mess around with the drive's firmware. Why not just create a small partition at the beginning of the disk and leave the rest unused?

I believe in that scenario, the firmware will still prepare for access the unpartitioned space.

 

[Ben90]

Everytime i see this article i gotta quote this from it:

"Because all drives are structured like disks, the data located towards the end of the drive (towards the edges), is more separated than the data located near the center, hence it takes less time to locate, read and write information to and from the drive. Since the drive is 1500 GB in size, 300 GB ends up being 20%. By setting the size to 20 % of the max, the drive uses the inside 20% of the disc thus bringing superior performance."

Glad he knows how hard drives work... pretty sure that would be called "long-stroking" lol... But yea, everyone knows short stroking improves reads and stuff, the raptor is probably still more responsive though due to 10k rpm

In other news: Underfunded Scientists Force Lipstick-Covered Rat With Cancer To Run Through Maze
http://www.theonion.com/conten...unded_scientists_force

 

[Nahsavtoo]

Out of curiosity what would happen if you did that with e WD VRaptor?

Would the speed noticeably improve on that as well?

 

[Zap]

Welcome to last month.

FuseTalk's search capabilities sometimes still work.

I'm actually thinking of trying short stroking some 1TB drives in my next LAN party rig. I've been using VelociRaptors, so this should be a decent comparison.

 

[Russwinters]

Two things:

FIRST THING:
You can do this with ANY high capacity drive.

All you are doing is modifying the DCO (Device configuration overlay) of the disc. There are multiple freeware utilities out there that can do this.

You can also find a tool that sets an HPA (Host protected area) that will do the same thing as well.



The reason this works is: All hard drives get slower towards the end of the drive AKA the inner tracks. This is because obviously there can't be as many sectors per track on the inner tracks because platters are circles and as you move inward the tracks will get shorter, but the density cannot get any more dense. Therefore the heads much change tracks more often on the inner tracks which is why is you run a tool like HDDscan etc, you will see that all drives will drop by ~20mb/s in speed from the beginning to the end.


Obviously any high capacity drive that is 1TB or larger is going to have extremely high SPT (Sectors per track) on the outer tracks, so this will work with any drive.


Second Thing:
Seagate 7200.11 drives suck. Unless you get one with updated firmware (which you likely won't) then the drive is going to fail, and fail quickly. This series drives has two huge firmware bugs that will either: Cause the drive to report a 0LBA (No sectors) or it will spin up and do nothing, this is called the LED:CC issue, but I am not going to go into that here.

Long story short, stay away from 7200.11 drives. and if you have one with any of these firmwares (its on the sticker) you should carefully flash your firmware with the utility provided by seagate before your drive fails, and you lose all of your data (unless you want to drop 300-500 bucks on recovery)

SD15 <- worst one
SD25 <- common
SD45 <- less common, but affected
HP24 <- for HP, also common
DE12 <- Dell, common
LC11 <- Lacie firmware; also common

 

[Syntax Error]

Where the hell did you get your firmware revisions? The only one I personally recognize in that bunch is SD15, which is a very early revision. There are plenty of CC1G/CC1H firmware drives out there that are working fine so far.

 

[Russwinters]

SD = Seagate firmware, this is for drives shipped either retail, or direct oem like newegg etc

HP - Hewlett packard special firmware (looked through it and there really isnt any difference)

DE: Dell (same thing as hp, not really anything different)

LC: For lacie, same story as hp and dell it has a different revision but the firmware looks to be the same




I am a DR technician, so I see all kinds of revisions of these drives and typically I never know WHERE the disk came from; I just diagnose and fix the things


Regards,