Today we'll be checking out not one, but two of Seagate's newest Barracuda 500GB 7200.9 drives. While the main selling point is the huge capacity, the latest Barracudas feature 16MB of cache, a 7200rpm spindle rate, a 3.0Gbps transfer rate as well as Native Command Queuing, hot plug support and staggered spin-up
While having a massive hard drive doesn't eliminate the need for backups, it does give people more headroom for storage (along with making many of us lazy about backups, but that's a subject for another day). Apps and games are getting more bloated so the drive you have now may be fine for your purposes, but you may hit a roadblock before you know it.
The Seagate Barracuda 500GB 7200.9
The model name was incorrect with our evaluation units, but the capacity was. Seagate did confirm with us before the review that this was an error on their part, and you can expect this corrected for the retail parts.
The Barracuda 7200.9 is a standard sized 3.5" hard drive, with no peculiar heatsinks or materials used in its chassis. Below is a quick cheat sheet comparing the 7200.9 (500GB) to the 7200.8 (400GB) and the 7200.7 (160GB) units which we've looked at earlier:
|
7200.9
|
7200.8
|
7200.7
|
| Speed (RPM) |
7200
|
7200
|
7200
|
| Cache (MB) |
16
|
8
|
8
|
| Ave. Seek Time (ms) |
8.5
|
8
|
8.5
|
| Platter Size (GB) |
125
|
133
|
80
|
| # of Platters |
4
|
3
|
1
|
As we can see, the biggest changes are the doubling of cache and the smaller platter sizes from the 7200.8 drives. All the 7200.9 drives 300GB and up will feature the 16MB of cache, with smaller capacities juggling between 2 or 8MB. A number of high-end competing products already feature the 16MB of cache, so the latest Barracuda will even out the playing field slightly.
The platters are not as dense as the 7200.8 we've reviewed, weighing in at 125GB each, down from 133GB which affects the average seek time by half a millisecond. Keep in mind the platter density does not differ due to the drive revision, but by it's capacity. The 400GB version of the 7200.9 will match the 7200.8 in almost every way except for the increased cache.
The Barracuda 7200.9 is a native SATA product and supports speeds of SATA 3.0Gb/s. Unlike some of the first batches of SATA drives, a native drive will bypass the legacy Task File reads and writes, as well as avoiding the limitation of 133 Mbytes/sec for Ultra DMA Mode 6 transfers. With that in mind, Seagate does offer a PATA version of the new Barracuda.
While the 7200.9 supports SATA 3Gb/s transfer speeds, it is backwards compatible with SATA 1.5GB/s hosts. The drive is also compatible with the newer ClickConnect SATA connectors which have yet to really run rampant in the market.
As debuted with the Barracuda 7200.7, the Barracuda 7200.9 fully supports Native Command Queuing (NCQ). Introduced with the Serial ATA II spec, this is a feature that can only be found in native SATA hard drives. Unlike LCQ, NCQ works by allowing a drive to process multiple commands at the same time. These commands can be rescheduled or reordered on a whim, and can also issue new requests while the drive is retrieving data from the previous request. While NCQ support is present on the drive, the controller used will also need to support NCQ in order to take advantage of it. As with the previous NCQ enabled Barracudas, the drive will work fine without an NCQ controller.
Other features of note is their SoftSonic motor, which reduces some of the "whine" typical in high speed drives, Enhanced G-Force Protection to protect it from minor bumps, as well as a 5-year warranty which is the best in the hard drive business.
Test Setup
MSI P4N Diamond nForce 4 SLI: Intel 3.73GHz Extreme Edition, 2 x 512MB Corsair TWIN2X PC5400, 2 x NVIDIA 6800GT, Windows XP SP1.
Going up against the Barracuda 7200.9 will be the Seagate Barracuda 7200.8. We'll be testing single drive performance for all the hard drives, as well as RAID-0.
Testing software will consist of the following:
IPEAK Storage Performance Toolkit w/Business Winstone & Content Creation - Using Intel's utility, we recorded all the IO operations needed in a typical run of Winstone 2004. We then played it back through IPEAK, averaging the scores of all the drives. This test is purely synthetic, but it will give us an idea of the drive's performance.
Multitasking with Business Winstone 2004 - Using a multitasking test included with the Winstone suite, which runs the test in the background while performing other tasks.
SYSMark 2004 Office - A scripted benchmark using real-world applications. For these tests, higher numbers are better.
Game level load tests w/Doom 3, Far Cry, Unreal Tournament 2004 - We'll be timing the load times of three games currently on the market. These results are real-world, and lower times are better.
File copies to internal IDE drive - We did a couple real-world tests, copying the contents of our UT2004 folder (~4GB) located on the test drives to an IDE Western Digital SE. Two tests were done where in one it's a straight copy from drive to drive, and the second test where we run a virus scan on the test drive while copying to simulate a load on it.
Business Winstone IPEAK
The Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 was the current champ in our last roundup and continues to hold the fort against the newer Barracuda. IPEAK is a heavily sequential test, and the lower density of 125GB per platter on the 7200.9 affects the final score.
Content Creation IPEAK
As we've seen in the Winstone IPEAK tests, the sequential read and writes are slightly better on the more densely packed 7200.8.
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