Seagate Barracuda 750 GB SATA II Hard Drive (7200.10)

Reviews: Storage

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Richard Poelling
Brian
Seagate
May. 20, 2007

Specifications

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Testing

The system used for testing consisted of an AMD XP3000 with an ASUS A7N8X-Deluxe motherboard. Since this drive is of the SATA II variety, I used a Promise SATA300 TX2plus PCI controller card. The driver version for this card was v1.00.0.33. Using the Promise PDCM utility I enabled TCQ/NCQ for all tests. All testing was performed on a clean Windows XP SP2 build with all current updates. The drive was slow formatted as a basic disk using NTFS which literally took forever! The drive formats to 698 GB. I lose more space than the capacity of some of my older disks! For the benchmarks I have chosen HD Tach, Diskbench and Iometer. I have also included some of the benchmarks from my 500GB drive roundup since I used the same test setup. The primary drive I will compare the 750 GB to is the older 500Gb 7200.9 drive. That particular model did not use the perpendicular recording. Although you can not get a true one to one comparison since the drive sizes are different, we can still get a feel to how they react to same test. In the end, they all serve the same purpose.

HDTach Benchmarks

For this set of benchmarks I am using Simpli Software's HDTach v RW 3.0.1.0. This benchmark is run on an unformatted drive. The full bench (variable zone, etc) was performed 3 times and the numbers averaged to yield the final result. The results of the full benchmark are broken down into three parts which are: Random Access Time, Average Read, and Sequential Read.

Random Access Time

The random access benchmark is exactly what it says, the average time to read a randomly located sector on the device.

Although there appears to be a big gap between the two, it really only equates to a .2 msec difference. For what it is worth, these drives performed identical in this test.

Average Read Test

This test is the average (in MB/s) from the sequential read which follows it. Due to differences in the location on the platter, you will not get a consistent read across the entire disk. The average read can give you an idea what to expect by factoring in both the fast and slow sectors of a disk.

I believe that the newer perpendicular technology is making a big difference here. Even for a larger drive, the average read is far better, almost 20 MB/sec better!

Sequential Read Test

This test is pretty self-explanatory. The benchmark reads every half gig across the entire disk. This comes down to about 1500 data points for those who are keeping score. That graph really is dotted lines, there are just a whole lot of them.

What a difference this drive makes. The 500 GB looks pathetic in comparison. Even the top performing Western Digital from our 500GB roundup got beat. It looks like Seagate has greatly improved their drives. There is about a 20 MB/sec difference at the beginning.

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Page 1: Introduction & First Looks
Page 2: Test Setup & HDTach Benchmarks
Page 3: Iometer & DiskBench Benchmarks
Page 4: Conclusion

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5 User Comments

1 - Posted by PsychoSnowMan on May 20, 2007 - 9:12 pm

The results on those tests look great for this drive, but how loud is it? Both spin and head movements?

2 - Posted by Rich on May 21, 2007 - 1:17 pm

The drive was really no different then the Hitachi 500GB I am running next to it. I could hear it when it was under heavy load, but nothing I would consider excessive in relation to what I have heard from other drives.

3 - Posted by jayman on May 22, 2007 - 5:33 pm

Been using one of these for quite awhile now, unfortunately the last 100 GB of the drive act up & click quite a bit, and several slow downs.

I have paired this drive with a "AMS Venus DS3 DS-2316SU2SBK" when I went on vacation, after several torture tests, the enclosure was cooled well enough, so that I could pick up the case afterwards, but of course it was very warm.

4 - Posted by Sapper21A on January 25, 2009 - 2:31 pm

I had 4 of these on a Mac Pro, ran them as RAID 0. Six months later, 1 & 2 went out within two weeks of each other. Now I have only been with 2 for almost a year, #3 just crashed. Not sure if I want to make #4 my number 1.

5 - Posted by Kurtis on January 25, 2009 - 8:50 pm

Sapper21A: Check this out... http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/13471/Seagate-OH...

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