Storage Effect

Performance delta between vendors highlights different designs 

Richard Poelling at The Tech Lounge recently reviewed three 1 terabyte SATA drives.  Seagate’s Barracuda 7200.11 and Barracuda ES.2 drives came out on top compared to Hitachi’s DeskStar 7K1000 drive. 

Additional takeaways:

• The Seagate drives were superior by a significant margin in most of the performance tests, including average Read/Write speed, DiskBench and IOmeter. 
• The Hitachi drive is 5 platters (200GB/platter); the Seagate drives are 4 platters (250 GB/platter).
• The reviewer pointed out that reliability is hard to measure, and gave the nod to Seagate based on its 5-year warranty vs. Hitachi’s 3-year warranty.
• Richard recommends the server-class Barracuda ES.2 if the additional price (~$50 based on his data) is not an issue.

1 TB SATA disk drives with blazing speed to boot…this industry has come a long way.

Server SATA drives spice up desktop PCs without adding much cost 

Want your desktop PC to stand out in a crowd?  You probably wouldn’t think of using storage - at least not without adding a lot of cost.  

Think again. 

Good Gear Guide reviews the Seagate Barracuda ES, a 7200 RPM SATA drive with a difference.  It’s a server drive, but unlike 15K RPM and 10K RPM drives, it’s priced at a small premium to mainstream desktop drives.  Plus, it has the high capacity (up to a terabyte) desktops demand these days.

Seagate’s details on the Barracuda ES can be found here.

Seagate designed this drive for high capacity business applications, but as this review shows, it creates an opportunity for system builders and consumers to build a better desktop. 

SSD is kinda cool in MacBook Air, but not worth today’s price

Ars Technica’s review of the MacBook Air provides a thorough user-level evaluation of the value of SSD in a notebook. 

The conclusion:

The $1,300 question is whether the SSD is worth the extra cash. The answer seems to be no. I experienced only moderate gains in battery life and not very noticeable speed differences. The one major benefit of the SSD model is that it doesn’t cause the same types of slowdowns as the HDD model during times of high disk activity, and that’s certainly a huge plus. Speedy read times are great, too, but they are balanced out by pokey write times.

Still, even if it’s more usable, it’s hard to justify the huge price difference for the SSD model. If you’ve got an extra $1,300 to blow and, for some reason, haven’t just bought a second computer with it, perhaps the SSD model is for you. For anyone else looking to buy an Air, the HDD model appears to provide the most bang for the buck.

You get what you pay for.  For SSDs, the ‘gets’ aren’t worth $1300 bucks.  The big surprise to me was that in some ways the SSD notebook was actually worse than the disk drive version. 

Don’t worry, the premium will drop and SSD’s will improve.  But it’s going to be years, not months, before most of us choose SSD.

N’Gai Croal at Newsweek has an insightful article on D.A.V.E., a wireless mobile storage device from Seagate highlighted at CES.

It’s 60GB of storage that quietly sits in your backpack, pocket, etc. and streams your movies or TV shows to your phone, car or wherever else you want to watch. 

It breaks through the limits of the mobile phone industry business model that precludes cell phones with lots of storage space inside to feed your mobile viewing habit.

 You can take it with you after all!

Consider Barracuda 7200.11 for gaming - performance AND capacity.

I’m proud of our new monster drive!  Tom’s hardware rates Barracuda 11 as the fastest 1 TB drive on the market. More interesting to gamer system builders:

“With the exception of access time and I/O benchmarks, it also clearly beats Western Digital’s 10,000 RPM Raptor, and sets the new standard for desktop hard drives.”

Raptor has been the defacto gamer drive for a long time.  Consider offering your customers a new twist: performance with capacity for their data-heavy gaming systems.

Here’s a comparison of the new 1 TB drives for the Mac world from Barefeats.  Over 100MB/sec for sequential reads and writes!  I’m happy to see such strong performance from a Seagate drive.  It hasn’t always been our strength. 

Take a close look at the Barracuda 11 at any capacity vs. a WD Raptor.  The Raptor spins at 10K, but net system performance differences to the newest 7200 rpm drives may be in the noise at a system level, especially given the price difference.