Seagate Barracuda 7200.8: 400GBs with NCQ
by Purav Sanghani on April 20, 2005 4:30 PM EST- Posted in
- Storage
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."
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.
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StormGod - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link
Hey Anandtech, please make sure your pages are 100% Firefox compatible! While were on the subject, you should really strive to make your pages HTML 4.01 compliant or XHTML 1.0 compliant.cosmotic - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link
I was going to comment on the headings too...SLIM - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link
The shading and color fill behind the headings and drive names is also missing in firefox. You can highlight the column headings to read what they are supposed to say in firefox. Glad I downloaded that ieview extension now.bigboxes - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link
Yup. The column headers for these tables do not show up in Firefox.shoRunner - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link
the column labels don't show up in firefox.shoRunner - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link
PuravSanghani - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link
segagenesis: It seems to be an issue with our sound meter or noise reduction process. We will look into it for our next review. Besides the echo, the recordings should be clear enough to differentiate how each drive sounds.Nighteye2: Your requests will be fulfilled soon. :)
Nighteye2 - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link
You know, with all this talk about NCQ, 1 question has not yet been answered: how does it work with RAID? Can you use NCQ on a RAID system?Also, I'd like to see these tests run on a RAID system, see the performance advantage it gives. Maybe compare 2 cheap, somewhat slower drives in a RAID array against a single HD that you can get for the same price?
segagenesis - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link
The benchmarks are hardly cut and dry yes, but I do enjoy the fact Seagate has a 5 year warranty on drives. This after seeing the industry at one point was putting out 1-year warranty stock on drives and if you paid extra, 3 years.Raptors are the fastest drives ive ever seen but the lack of space keeps them from being all inclusive. I was kind of suprised that the 7200.8 beat out the Raptor as far as game loading went!
Whats with the weird echo-ish sound recordings of the hard drive noise? What on earth did you use to do this?
FreshPrince - Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - link
man, I need to learn how to use this...anyways...I bought 40 of these drives for my company.16 goes into one raid and another 16 goes into another raid. So far so good, I hear no complaints from my tech guys.
Also, I took 2 and used it as a DFS file server, it's handling 75 users no problems. :-)