Storage Forums: Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 - Storage Forums

In recent days, Seagate's Barracuda ATA series, while boasting impressively low noise floors, has failed to contend with performance leaders. The manufacturer's latest addition to the line is the 80 GB/platter Barracuda 7200.7. How does it stack up? SR puts the standard ATA-100 version as well as a serial ATA sample to the test!

Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 Review

Excellent review on an excellent drive.
The SATA 160GB model is perfect for home/office use. Above average (decent to good) performance and still quiet operation. If its reliability continues to Seagate standards then we have a very nice drive indeed.

Well, I'll give it my recommendation:

Wizard's Safe Buy


PS. Too bad I'm only talking about the flagship...

lol@headbanger

I'm going to go ahead and ask the obvious question: why wasn't the 8mb PATA drive tested as well? I'd like to know if there is any difference between the SATA and the PATA drives, all else being equal, and this would be a good drive to test it on.

I have an ongoing argument with a friend of mine that SATA won't directly make a difference in performance anytime soon (which I've later refined to "within the next 18 months"). He thinks that there will be a difference, and I'd just love some more ammuntion to prove me right for now .

I think I'll take your pal's voice in this one, warmonger. IMO SATA's current implementation is being underestimated. Already VIA's new chipset, KT600, is supporting natively SATA and I expect others to follow the example.
Remember that although no drives can reach the 150MB/s bandwidth limit of SATA you can hook up two (or even three) drives serially without major bottleneck issues.
Also consider SATA drives in RAID positioning once they become old. For that use (streaming) the extra bandwidth might help.

I was talking about single drive performance though. I've heard a lot of hype about command queuing and a few of the other SATA features (which the 7200.7 supposedly has), and I'd just like to see a comparison to see whether they make much real difference in this generation of drives.

If you look at the SATA Working Group's site, they make it clear that the main reason for SATA is for "future enhancements to the computing platform."

Honestly, I'd love it if the drives actually do raise performance to another level. When that happens I'll be happy to pay the premium, but I'm just skeptical that it will happen any time soon.

warmonger, on Jun 17 2003, 01:04 PM, said:

Let me offer a hodgepodge of reasons in no particular order:

1) HyperMicro only carries the SATA version.

2) I wasn't even aware of the Plus versions at the time that I personally bought the standard PATA version.

3) Seagate was only able to send us the standard PATA version (well after I bought my own as the article indicates) six months after the product's announcement. They still say they can't spare an SATA unit... what confidence do I have in them being able to pull a single Plus from their assembly line for lowly SR when it'll fetch $100 from a wholesaler?

4) There are limits to my finances. My debt-income ratio somewhere between 2:1 and 3:1, in a large part to maintain SR to the best of my ability. That said, because of Seagate's six-month dragging of feet, I felt compelled to buy the PATA drive to deliver a review to SR readers. This again before I knew seagate was finally willing to spare one standard unit and before HyperMicro started to carry SATA units. Had HM stocked them before I bought the standard sample the review probably would have presented only the PATA unit.

So, the solutions:

1) Light up SR's donation jar with contributions. I'd assume that anything coming in over the next month would be due predominately to this post.

2) Light up seagate's email and point out how silly it seems that it takes them 6 months to get us a 160 GB PATA drive when they can get us next-generation 15k devices well before release (and hope that they speed up ATA samples rather than delaying SCSI samples to get them in sync ).

3) Sit back, buckle up, and wait until Seagate's board of directors determines that the bottom line won't suffer if they pull a single 7200.7 Plus.

We better cut & paste the link of this thread and mass mail it to Seagate!

Anyway, since what's really interesting about this drive is the 160GB+SATA+quietness, I guess the right model was reviewed afterall.

Hi,
I have just bought a Seagate ST3160023A and connected it to my Maxtor Ultra ATA/133 controller having the latest Promise 2.20.0.15 bios. (Maxtor Ultra ATA/133 Card is exactly the same controller card produced by Promise, but named as Ultra 133 TX2 by them.)

I have seen that the new HDD is really fast...

On HDTach 2.61:
max read: 61324kps, min read: 26632kps, average read: 46231.9kps, average access time: 14.6ms, CPU use: 5.5% and Read Burst over 80Mb/s

On SiSoft Sandra, File System Bench:
Drive Index: 36,644kB/s, Buffered Read: 75MB/s, Sequential Read: 55MB/s, Random Read: 8MB/s, Buffered Write: 57MB/s, Sequential Write: 9MB/s and Average Access Time: 7ms.

I have FAT32 formatted the drive with single 160GB partition, loaded Intel Application Accelerator Rev. 2.3.0.2160 on WinME. (I think with Win2000/XP on NTFS the results might be higher.)

But the problem is: The drive can not boot with Promise chip! I have a WD1200JB and it can manage to boot with my Maxtor's external controller using WD's disc utility program Data Life Guard v.10 on my i820 based Asus P3C-E motherboard. I have used Seagate's latest Disc Wizard utility Ver. 10.36 but no cure...

Finally, a good drive but needed to be used as an additional storage with Promise chip based Maxtor Ultra ATA/133 card. I have heard that on Promise Raid chip based controllers the same problem arises too. Be carefull when buying if you have a Promise controller chip on board or an external controller like mine!!!

Seashield is also not available back on the unit too. I have seen the shield on SATA based ST3160023AS based units on internet ads. UATA model is loosed that part. Are we convincing to remove the ATA controllers by a brutal force?

I have to say I was sad to see that the high capacity Serial ATA models don't come with a 3 year warranty...I don't really like the idea of spending so much money on a drive with only a 1 year warranty

I guess it'll have to be a 7200.7 Plus, and hope that the 8MB cache makes all the difference...it's the seek time difference in particular that I'm concerned about - windows felt snappier on my old 120GXP than it does on my current 2MB buffer 7200.7, and I was hoping to get some of that old speed back.

I note the HDTach seek time cemal gurel has posted is more like the 2MB PATA drive than the SATA version, which isn't a good start, for me!

Please Seagate, let the next series of Cudas have a 3 year warranty for high end SATA units...!