Seagate 400GB 7200.8 Barracuda - Review

[Thyhammerr]

Seagate 400GB 7200.8 Barracuda Internal Hard Drive ST340032AS



Introduction:

Disk drives have evolved to massive capacities and buffer memory level throughout this decade. Hardisk is an integral component for any computer and having a good hardisk with good speed with good capacity is any computer user’s wish. Currently there are few players in hard disk drive market and competition between them has always led to consumer’s fulfillment. The advancement in storage technology from past few decades has led manufacturers to come up with higher capacity drives with low seek speeds and high speed ones. Currently in Pakistan, 3 to 4 manufacturers are raking in when it comes to hard drives. When it comes to hard drives, Seagate is one of the prominent brands no one forgets to mention. Seagate is one of those brands that people cannot forget when it comes to Hardware Industry in Pakistan. In competition to it, Western Digital, Maxtor and recently massively introduced Samsung drives are there. There are several other brands moving around like Toshiba, Hitachi and Nikimi, but the fact is that major players in this industry are these four. With Maxtor merging with Seagate, one can only expect what will be the impact of this merger on Pakistan' IT scene.

We have 400GB barracuda with us today for review. Hard disk space has always been an issue for gamers, professionals and enthusiasts. Those who are looking for good hard drives are always tied between having either a spacious hard drives or faster ones. The fact of the matter is that a faster hard drive doesn’t always have to be the lower capacity ones. Seagate has a complete range of barracuda’s running at 7200RPM’s with capacities ranging from 40GB to 750GB. While in comparison only workstation based professional hard drives offer such capacities at speeds like 10,000RPM or 15,000RPM but in return, you have to pay A LOT for them.



Specifications:




The Barracuda:

You must’ve noticed that I’ve skipped the packaging section. Well because the hard disk came in hard drive jewel case enclosed in a card board box cushioned with a lot of form material specifically made for these hard drives. I couldn’t blame them for using too much cushioning material, well because storage devices like these wouldn’t be best suited for bumps. They’re pretty fragile.



From the looks, the drive will fit any other 3.5� bay for hard disk drives. Usually the size or capacity of the drive doesn’t depend upon the platters they have. Well, if you don’t know, around 10 years back they had hardrives, bigger then today’s internal optical drives. So you can say that they were pretty big.

The barracuda we have here has disk space capacity of 400GB. Since we’re an online community and most of the users here spend a lot of time on the computer, it wouldn’t be a surprise that nearly 60% of people here download over 10GB of stuff per month, while most probably deleting other stuff for making room for new stuff in your partitions. Basically, 5 modern games with windows XP SP2 and necessary tools and utilities would span to over 70GB or so. Then there is a need for storing music, movies, anime and other certain unspeakable files or so , I believe your everyday 120GB would be quite full by now. So the need for more is definitely there. In most cases, people have multiple drives mounted on there PCs and frankly with more drives boot time increases. While the fact that space definitely increases, but I prefer having one 7200RPM drive whether it is 120GB or 200GB and backing up everything I have on other devices such as IDE enclosure or so. The risk is there and accessing that data from a USB enclosure takes sometimes too but the PC is quieter, power consumption is lower then most and a bit lag seen in multiple drives when moving files is gone. That is why I prefer single drives.

As far as this drive is concerned, it’s native SATA compatible. By native, we mean that it fully supports SATA’s speed of 1.5Gb/s, unlike first batches of SATA drives that appeared. Native SATA drives bypasses the legacy task file reads, as well as avoiding previous drive’s ultra DMA mode limitation of 133MB/s transfer.



This drive also incorporates some SATA II features as well but it is SATA drive and not officially SATA II drive. This means that the drive’s said transfer rate is still 1.5GB/s. the drive also supports NCQ (Native Command Queing), unlike other drives, fully SATA Compatible drives features NCQ. This feature allows drives to process multiple requests, that is multiple commands at the same time, reschedule them, reorder them and make new requests while the data from another request is being transferred. To avail this feature, you have to make sure the controller you have is NCQ compatible as well. But this doesn’t mean that the drive won’t work without NCQ controller. It will work but NCQ feature won’t be there.

I noticed something else when I was running this drive. The drive was working very quietly. Which was a bit surprise coming from a Seagate drives. I’ve used a lot of Seagate drives, in fact I’ve never used anything else besides Seagate in past and more or less they weren’t this quite. On research, I found out that the drives had a SoftSonic motor that reduces spinning noise which comes from a lot of drives.



The drive is based on three 133 GB platters. With theoretical capacity of 399GB, the drive has formatted data capacity of approximately 372GB. More or less it’s a bit low for 400GB don’t you think. Anyway the fact that 40GB drive shows 36GB formatted capacity is of two reasons. One, some space is reserved on the platter so that in case of any bad sectors, those reserved clusters are used. Two, the manufacturers consider 1000b as 1Kb, but operating system consider 1024b as 1Kb. Basically the first one I mentioned is called decimal representation and the second one is called binary representation. Basically, according to industry standards, they use decimal representation so when they’re saying 10Kb, they mean 9.7Kb. Aside that fact, there are couple of other reasons why you’re not utilizing your drive’s capacity to it’s full potential including the FDISK program in pre XP SP2 installation disk which allows you to make partitions below 130GB or so. So make sure you’re utilizing your HD’s capacity to it’s full.



One other thing I forgot to mention about these drives is that it comes with an 8MB buffer size. Newer drives from Seagate in higher capacity end are now coming with 16MB buffer size so make sure you’re getting 16MB one.

Testing:
We conducted couple of tests on this drive regarding read speeds, write speeds and other tests. Most of these tests are synthetic so more or less the performance difference in number of drives isn’t that much to mention but to see if it is on the standard compared to other drives we have, I think that’ll be enough to make sure if you want this 400GB capacity based drive or not. We’re going to put this drive against one of the fastest drives around, WD Raptor 74GB 10,000RPM and a WD 200GB 7200.7 RPM drive.

Test Bench:
AMD 3500+ Venice
EVGA nForce 4 SLI Motherboard
OCZ 2GB Platinum Edition Enhanced Bandwidth
EVGA GeForce 7800GT 256MB GDDR3
OCZ Modstream 520W PSU
Windows XP SP2 Recent Updated Copy

To keep it simple, we'll be doing couple of pseudo-real world benchmarks including some of the latest ones. All tests were conducted on 1024x768 (85Hz) desktop resolution. All game load tests were done at highest image detail.

HD Tach 3:


Sysmark Office 2004:


SIS Sandra 2005:


File Copy Benchmark:
In this benchmark, average read and write speeds were taken in copying a 400MB file from one place to another.



System Boot Time:


Far Cry Load Time:


More or less, the 74GB Raptor has the lead due to the fact that it’s quite faster then the barracuda we have here and is quite smaller in capacity as well. But as you can see the barracuda keeps up with the benchmarks. Another thing I noticed during the benchmarks and normal day usage is that the CPU utilization has always been pretty low. Compared to the other Western Digital 80GB SATA on my other.

A lot of you here must’ve been carrying entertainment files more than games and programs. So basically only those people will buy these drives that’re looking for storage solutions rather than performance. But still performance wise the drive isn’t looking bad either. Considering it has three platters with NCQ and native SATA support with 8MB buffer size like any other normal SATA native drive, it’s definitely not bad.

Conclusion:

A lot is to be said about this drive. From price perspective, the drive costs somewhere around Rs. 10,000 to Rs. 12,000. Which isn’t a bad deal since 250GB or so, costs somwhere around Rs. 6000. So basically buying one drive rather than 2 is obviously better. It saves power, more slots for more drives and is quieter then 2 in place.

There are several solutions you can come up with these drives. Including Raid solutions or getting a faster drive for your primary and these as your secondary storage solutions like media or music. The drive’s performance isn’t bad either but I’ve heard some things regarding it getting hot but in my use, the drive’s temperature remained somewhat cooler. Speedfan reported 49 Deg Celcius as highest temperature in load and around 45 as normal idle temperature. So I don’t think the drive is getting too hot. The WD Raptor’s highest temperature was somewhere around 55 Deg.

More or less, the drive is quiet, cool, big and a performer. So I don’t think you should hold back and not get one of these drives. The drive comes with 5 years of warranty, which is best in the business, Since you never know when your drive goes down. I've been using this drive for quite a while now and still Speed fan reports it above 96% performance and fitness.

Currently, when I say this, 400GB is more then enough hard disk drive space for users who plays games, watches movies, and listens to music and just browse around the web. And I think most of the people who’re reading this, belongs to the category I mentioned. Unless you’re making a file server, collecting certain files and (ofcourse) not making backups, 400GB will be enough for you. 133GB per platter reduces the seek time and latency compared to other drives in this high capacity category but the fact of the matter is, more space kills the performance. This drive here still keeps the gap more or less under unnoticable values.

Another thing to note here is that NCQ feature is utilized in a very few number of applications while more and more number of controllers are utilizing the NCQ feature, applications utilizing this feature will also increase.

Pros:
- Quiet
- 133GB / Platter
- High Capacity
- NCQ
- Decent Performance

Cons:
- A bit Behind WD Raptor in performance

Special Thanks to Seagate for providing this drive for review purpose.

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