Seagate 7200.11 Full Review - "Raptor says: I challenge you to a duel"

[dominick32]

OK Guys.
As usual, OCForums is always the first place to get my review when it goes live. Instead of converting html to vb code I am going to simply quote the intro and link to the article. Hope you guys like...

Seagate Barracuda 7200.11
1/17/2008
Author: Dominick V. Strippoli

"The Raptor Says to the Barracuda: I challenge you to a duel!"

Reviews of Seagate's latest SATA Barracuda iteration, dubbed the 7200.11 have been floating all over the internet claiming that the drive gives a Western Digital Raptor 150 a run for its money and than some. The new Seagate drive is offered in capacities of up to 1 TB, using the SATAII standard, and using a 7200 RPM rotational speed. A major difference in the latest iteration of the Barracuda is the upgrade to a 32MB cache/buffer. The onboard HDD cache upgrade to this size was unheard of in the SATA industry until Seagate and Samsung brought out these newer drives. The manufacturer is claiming a drive that seeks comparably to other top of the line large capacity drives. Seagate also claims sustained throughput higher than any other SATA drive we have seen so far. The drive specs are top notch on paper, and it seems to be a perfect candidate to put up directly against the infamous Western Digital Raptor 150. And so the Raptor says to the Barracuda: "I challenge you to a duel!"

Read the full review here: http://www.nextlevelhardware.com/storage/barracuda/

 

[ghost_recon88]

great stuff man, I absolutely love my pair.

 

[Suprchargd]

Reading it now...

 

[CGR]

What really is annoying is you can get the seagate for A LOT less than the raptor and have just as good performance...

 

[jmorgan]

What really is annoying is you can get the seagate for A LOT less than the raptor and have just as good performance...

Are you kidding? Did you read the review? Raptor is way better at everything except for huge files.

 

[nd4spdbh2]

What really is annoying is you can get the seagate for A LOT less than the raptor and have just as good performance...

Thats cus theres no other consumer 10k rpm hd on the market... i swear seagate just needs to take their 7200.11's and change out the motors in em to a 10k variant... how friggin sick would that be.... an extra 28% of STR and 28% less random acess time... an average of ~113MB/s across 500gb and ~ 9ms response. ONLY time will tell!

 

[CGR]

Are you kidding? Did you read the review? Raptor is way better at everything except for huge files.

Ehhhhh. No, the raptor was better in some areas but not by much. Definitely not $100+ better.

 

[dominick32]

Here is official Pricing. I am going to add it to the review:
WD Raptor 150 = $170
7200.11 500GB = $120

There is a $50 difference between the two drives.

 

[dominick32]

Ehhhhh. No, the raptor was better in some areas but not by much. Definitely not $100+ better.

Each drive is better at its own specific task.

For gaming, app loading and general usage = Raptor
For photo/video editing and working with large files = Seagate

 

[jmorgan]

7200.11 = $120
raptor 150 = $170

Raptor dominated, 30% for most things everyday usage stuff, 7200.11 better for big files, video editing.

Edit: see if I was on a raptor I would of beat Dom to posting lol

 

[CGR]

7200.11 = $120
raptor 150 = $170

Raptor dominated, 30% for most things everyday usage stuff, 7200.11 better for big files, video editing.

Edit: see if I was on a raptor I would of beat Dom to posting lol

The only area I saw raptor beating seagate by 30% was in server platforms. Everything else was minimal in world world apps to me.

I dont care about 6 second differnce OS loading times or map loading times. When you put the cost and size into the equation, Seagate wins hands down.

 

[dominick32]

The only area I saw raptor beating seagate by 30% was in server platforms. Everything else was minimal in world world apps to me.

I dont care about 6 second differnce OS loading times or map loading times. When you put the cost and size into the equation, Seagate wins hands down.

I dont think he is speaking in terms of price to performance. He is just generalizing. If money is no object and you want a *quicker* drive, even if it is only marginally quicker. The Raptor is still the faster drive for everyday use.

 

[neonlazer]

I need a quick tip here!..im in bios setting up raid..whats the fastest strip size? default is 128kb

now after i raid XP installation doesnt see them..$#@& it i cant even get into raid bios anymore cause keyboard isnt responding to raid bios but it does for main bios..xp was seeing it as just the two hard drives so maybe its just a mistype..

 

[jintatsu]

depends on what you will be using them.. will go for the 7200.11 though..

 

[tuskenraider]

Ehhhhh. No, the raptor was better in some areas but not by much. Definitely not $100+ better.

You can say that about every top of the line piece of hardware out there, whether it's a CPU, Video Card, etc, etc. I'll spend $100 more for a 15% better hard drive for my use, than $700 more for the newest unlocked Intel QX CPU that "might" run a couple hundred mhz faster. Your own priorities will steer your decision of course.

My question for Dominick is if the Real World testing and whatnot was done with a Seagate 50GB partition and if so, why wasn't the Raptor partitioned for 50GB as well?

 

[MR-FIX-IT]

7200.11 = $120
raptor 150 = $170

Raptor dominated, 30% for most things everyday usage stuff, 7200.11 better for big files, video editing.

Edit: see if I was on a raptor I would of beat Dom to posting lol

Put two of these in RAID 0, and get awesome speed and 70% more space.

 

[dominick32]

My question for Dominick is if the Real World testing and whatnot was done with a Seagate 50GB partition and if so, why wasn't the Raptor partitioned for 50GB as well?

Hey Tusken. Sorry for the mis-understanding, I did put this review out super fast and rushed some of the details. I will go over the portion of the review that you are talking about:

Although HDTach is a widely used and well known benchmark. My personal opinion, as well as the opinion of many enterprise readers will definitely agree that IOMeter is the closest you are going to get to "dead on" accurate when measuring your HDD performance. If you take a look at the results above you, the Raptor gets absolutely thrashed in both sustained read and sustained write operations. There is close to a 25% advantage using the newer Barracuda drive. Why is there such a large differentiation between the IOMeter results and the HDTach results? Easy, IOMeter gives you the ability to decide how large and where you want your testing capacity stored. For this test, I chose to use a 50GB max partition on the Seagate drive, rather than using the entire 500 GB of the drive. We have achieved an astounding 104 MB/s sustained write and 105 MB/s sustained read on a 7200 RPM mechanical drive. This means as long as you create below a 100GB partition on this drive for your operating system and page file, you can benefit from 100+ MB/s sustained throughput. I honestly feel that this is a breakthrough in traditional SATA drive technology.

First off, I did not use a 50GB partition on the drive. I used a 50GB MAX IOMeter testing partition. This means there was 5GB of data on the drive, and I used IOMeter to fill the other 45GB with testing space. <---- This in turn allows IOMeter to give you maximum STR and access time on the drive.

On the other hand, the WD Raptor got the same treatment. I only used a 15 GB testing capacity on the drive, making our total test partition 20GB's. Hence using only the first 20GB's of the drive for testing. This method of using the quickest portion of the drive will get us our maximum STR's. Hope this helps explain things a bit.

For the entire review. The Raptor was a fresh drive using the entire drive capacity, as well as the full 465GB usable capacity of the 7200.11. Just for clarification, the only portion that my results reflect what I have explained was the IOMeter testing portion.

Regards,

 

[satandole666]

I'll definitely use a pair of these for my upcoming HTPC/file server build. Nice review.

 

[dominick32]

I'll definitely use a pair of these for my upcoming HTPC/file server build. Nice review.

Thanks bud.
I have some interesting results starting my 2 drive Raid 0 review. Using a 50GB volume of 2 X 25GB on Intels Matrix Storage Manager.

Raid 0 - 50GB (2x25GB)

Raid 1 - 473GB Mirroring Setup
http://timeslips.svtsnake.com/raid1.jpg

 

[MassiveOverkill]

Thanks bud.
I have some interesting results starting my 2 drive Raid 0 review. Using a 50GB volume of 2 X 25GB on Intels Matrix Storage Manager.

Raid 0 - 50GB (2x25GB)

Raid 1 - 473GB Mirroring Setup
http://timeslips.svtsnake.com/raid1.jpg

You think you could redo that test with a RAID 0 200GB (2x100)?