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Faceoff at One Terabyte: Seagate's ES.2 and WD's GreenPower

#1 User is offline   Eugene Icon

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Posted 30 September 2007 - 02:42 PM

Leveraging a unique five-platter design, Hitachi Global Storage managed to bring the formidable Deskstar 7K1000 to the market well before competing designs. For several months now, Hitachi's beast has combined the best capacity and performance one could get on the SATA interface. Now, however, competitors Seagate and Western Digital have commenced shipment of their first terabyte units... and each manufacturer's take is a bit different from that of Hitachi's.

The Review

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#2 User is offline   AmenophisIII Icon

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Posted 30 September 2007 - 09:21 PM

thanks eugene!

would be very nice to have (more) details about ncq/non ncq performance of the seagate drive (because it was discussed in the forums lately, that those are responsible for the nice multiuser performance of the 7200.11/es2 drives http://forums.storag...howtopic=26006)

... and of course id like to see a samsung f1 review soon :)

This post has been edited by AmenophisIII: 30 September 2007 - 09:23 PM

AmenophisIII

#3 User is offline   continuum Icon

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Posted 01 October 2007 - 01:08 AM

A Samsung F1 review would require the drive actually existing in channels. :P

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Posted 01 October 2007 - 08:16 AM

Now it is a really interesting review offering surprises in every sub-test comparison graph...

Looks like today's HDD production and marketing is starting to move into new (in fact old but already almost forgotten) directions - every manufacturer has found its own special way with their 1TB drives:
* Hitachi = for performance fans (home gaming, processing and benchmarking users);
* Seagate = for server needs (high-load enterprise users);
* WD = for ergonomy "quiet&cool" lovers (home multimedia and consumer electronics users, but also for low-load storage).
* Samsung = for budget lovers... hehe thanks to Samsung we have so nice HDD prices today!

But the thing I like most with the review here... That's personally I'm very happy to see 5400rpm 3.5" drives come-back! But not those ancient ball-bearing and power-hungry 5400rpm 3.5" ones we remember from some years ago - instead of we can get now the latest technology and best firmwares in conjunction with 5400rpm! And really I love those results for WD10EACS - very impressive cool and quiet "big" drive! And also this low rpm probably makes the drive more reliable too - it must be just so! You know today we have a lot of home and semi-professional storage solutions around (local file sharing, multimedia sharing servers, external drives, etc.) - all these really do not need to be top-speedy, instead of just cool running and quiet running are more essential factors. So, these 5400rpm WD drives are just ideal for pretty wide use today... and not at home only I think - also some professional storages very need such economical low-rpm drives - backup and other low-duty storage solutions containing hundreds or thousands of drives - there this energy-economy makes really sense. And there's no need to run these drives 7200rpm or higher... Khmm, do you remember we discussed about that 3.5" 5400rpm drive marketing on SR forums here just some months ago, too!

Anyway, it's surprising to see even with this low-rpm (and so having noticeably lower STR and longer seek time) the 1TB WD drive still outperforms the new 7200rpm 1TB Seagate in most of real life tests here! That's the real magic of drive's firmware! Of course I understand Seagate has put efforts on multi-user performance now but... what the hell did the Seagate's firmware engineers thought when constructing the previous 750GB top-capacity drive. As we can look at the comparison graphs in the review here this drive is mostly the bottom one in all kind of tests not giving any advantages for home user neither for server user!

However one another thing I can't understand is why the real results in startup power consumption are so inverted - the fastest drive (Hitachi) has very intelligent really low start-up current and at the same time WD's GreenPower isn't no more anything "Green" in this particular performance having one of the highest power use! Anyway, it was already well known fact that Seagate drives are traditionally the most power-hungry ones at start-up but now the new 1TB Seagate makes another surprise in it being just less hungry!

And we can find more another interesting observations in the very good review here... Thanks Eugene!

#5 User is offline   Olaf van der Spek Icon

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Posted 01 October 2007 - 09:14 AM

Does WD have any plans to release a normal-performance 1 tbyte drive? Cool & Quiet is nice, but I don't think everyone likes to trade in performance like this.

This post has been edited by Olaf van der Spek: 01 October 2007 - 09:15 AM

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Posted 01 October 2007 - 09:52 AM

View PostOlaf van der Spek, on Oct 1 2007, 05:14 PM, said:

Does WD have any plans to release a normal-performance 1 tbyte drive? Cool & Quiet is nice, but I don't think everyone likes to trade in performance like this.

Hitachi fills this marketing segment already in best possible way. I think it's hardly probable that proposed WD's 1TB performance drive can be any better than the current 1TB Hitachi is (although there are some probabilities because of 250 vs 200 platters used).

Anyway here's the results of one small local questionary about what home computer people prefer primarily to get from HDDs. Don't take it very seriously (it wasn't very high-populated questionary) but still some clear tendencies are noticeable:

33% Reliability & Stability
32% Quiet & Low vibrations
19% Speed & Performance
6% Longer warranty & Lower price
2% Cool-running
8% No preferences or subjective decisions

Surprisingly high percentage is preferring just low-noise operations. At the same time cool-running is less a concern for most. It may be a bit controversial but probably because of there was only one answer (primary preference) possible to choose from...

#7 User is offline   Mickey Icon

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Posted 01 October 2007 - 11:40 AM

View PostOlaf van der Spek, on Oct 1 2007, 07:14 AM, said:

Does WD have any plans to release a normal-performance 1 tbyte drive? Cool & Quiet is nice, but I don't think everyone likes to trade in performance like this.

That does bring up an interesting point. With this review, we're seeing the various HDD makers attacking different targets. Will we see each of them try to fill all the various niches at the same time so there is full competition in all markets? Or will they focus on particular areas?

#8 User is offline   DigitalFreak Icon

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Posted 01 October 2007 - 01:49 PM

Good review. However, I don't think any valid comparisons can be made between the WD GP and the Seagate ES.2 architectures until a 7200.11 1TB drive gets reviewed. It's pretty obvious that the ES.2 is not meant for desktop usage.

#9 User is offline   continuum Icon

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Posted 01 October 2007 - 02:00 PM

View PostDigitalFreak, on Oct 1 2007, 11:49 AM, said:

Good review. However, I don't think any valid comparisons can be made between the WD GP and the Seagate ES.2 architectures until a 7200.11 1TB drive gets reviewed. It's pretty obvious that the ES.2 is not meant for desktop usage.
that may be true, but there's also the recent history to consider-- even desktop-marketed Seagate drives have performed pretty poorly vs. their desktop-marketed counterparts. You do raise a valid point, tho.

Quote

Does WD have any plans to release a normal-performance 1 tbyte drive? Cool & Quiet is nice, but I don't think everyone likes to trade in performance like this.
I'm wondering this myself As for 200GB vs. 250GB platters, the WD GP 1TB is definitely a 4x250GB drive-- WD doesn't have any current production 5-platter designs and doesn't seem likely to change.

#10 User is offline   StoX Icon

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Posted 01 October 2007 - 05:03 PM

Awesome review. Top marks!

Now, I only want a similar one including the Samsung SpinPoint F1 1000GB 32MB SATA II (HD103UJ).

Thanks!
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