Seagate ships world's fastest desktop Hard Drive

[SandmanNinja]

Seagate ships world's fastest desktop Hard Drive

 

http://machineslikeus.com/news/seagate-ships-worlds-fastest-desktop-hard-drive

 

Seagate Technology today began global shipments of the world’s fastest, largest-capacity mainstream desktop hard drive – Barracuda® XT, a 7200RPM product featuring 2TB of storage capacity and a blazing fast Serial ATA (SATA) 6Gb/second interface. The 3.5-inch desktop drive, the industry’s first to feature a SATA 6Gb/s interface, meets the capacity demands of gaming, digital video-environments and other storage-hungry desktop computing applications while delivering the highest performance in its class.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

So what does this mean? I assume it is in terms of mechanical/magentic drives? ...in other words, I am guessing this doesn't out perform Intel's SSD drives, or does it?

[SandmanNinja]

Well, I'm not sure. I'm trying to add News content to the forum, news that's somewhat relevent to the community and that might draw interest.

 

A 2tb drive is bloody huge. 6GB/Sec is really fast.

 

I know there has been discussion about SSD drives Real World read/write times (i.e. non-sequentially) versus a traditional HD, so maybe this is faster.

[Jeff Mottle]

Did some Googling and pulled this excerpt from some reviews here:

 

Seagate Momentus 7200.4 500GB HDD vs an OCZ Vertex Series SATA II SSD

http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/308109/review_hard_disk_vs_solid-state_drive_--_an_ssd_worth_money?pp=1

 

 

The ATTO benchmark software showed the OCZ had a read time of 244MB/sec and a write time of 172MB/sec. The Seagate HDD had an average read rate of 98MB/sec and a write time of 87MB/sec. Using HDTach, the read/write results were quite different. OCZ's drive showed a 196MB/sec read rate, the Seagate, 84.6MB/sec.

 

 

VelociRaptor

 

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9111089/Review_Three_new_Western_Digital_drives_hit_top_speeds?taxonomyId=149&pageNumber=2

 

 

 

According to HD Tach, the VelociRaptor racked up a 250.3MB/sec. burst speed, the highest I've recorded for a mechanical drive. It equaled that record with a 105.6MB/sec. average read result. (Random access was a jaw-dropping 7ms.)

 

From what it looks like you can't compare the data rates between SSD and HHD without running a benchmark test, but as a point of reference the Velociraptor is generally known as one of the fastest mechanical drives out there and on the WD site they indicate a 3GB/s. So this new drive looks to be twice as fast. If these things scale linearly then you could probably take the results above for the HHD and double them.

 

If they are indeed double then it's still slower than my RAID 0 Torqz SSD, http://www.cgarchitect.com/vb/37163-need-new-system-asap-electrical-storm-4.html#post261158

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

You certainly saw this video that someone posted over on Jeff's computer building thread..

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_Jz7IMwBt4

 

Now, I think the Raptor is a 3gb/s interface, so the Seagate drive above is twise as fast, but man, that Intel SSD just flies in this video.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

http://www.computerworld.com/s/artic...9&pageNumber=2

 

I found this note from the article posted at Computer World interesting... Meaning, it may account for what I am seeing in the YouTube video link above.

 

(Keep in mind that most SSD vendors publish sequential read/write rates, which are much faster than random I/O. But most operations on a desktop or laptop are random. For example, file systems and e-mail applications mostly use random operations, while system boot up or copying a large file from a USB drive involves sequential operations. So, in general, don't believe the packaging hype.)

[Jeff Mottle]

I had velociraptors in my old system and annecdotally my new SSD are easily 10x faster in day to day operations. So even with the new 6GB/s drive I think SSDs will still beat the pants off them.

 

While it could be debated if getting an SSD is really worth the money in terms of being able to speed up production, but in the last 15 years, this is the first time where a component in an upgrade made my system feel significantly faster than the previous version. Normally I would upgrade every 2-4 years and the new machine never felt like it was that much faster. Rendering time sure...but not actual OS usage, opening files etc. The SSDs made it feel like going from an 8086 with a coprocessor to a new i7. Having used SSDs now, there is no way I could ever go back.

[IceAged]

Jeff - considering the currently high price of the SSD's, are you using a combination of old-school drives and SSD's, or purely solid state?

[Jeff Mottle]

Jeff - considering the currently high price of the SSD's, are you using a combination of old-school drives and SSD's, or purely solid state?

 

My workstation has two 128 GB SSD drives (RAID 0) and one 64 GB SSD for Lightroom and PS. My network server is all RAID 5 mechanical drives. I don't envision switching that over to SSD anytime soon. I would like to upgrade my laptop though.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

Tasty. A main board with SATAIII 6gb/s, USB 3.0, and 6 RAM slots. Unfortunately not on market yet.

http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/16043/37/

[SandmanNinja]

That's sexy...