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Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 500GB SATA3G HDD
Contributed by Jason Hambly
Thursday, 17 November 2005
Last Updated Monday, 08 May 2006
Seagate is once again setting a new standard with their newest line of 3.5? hard disk drives. The Barracuda 7200.9 is
the newest offering from Seagate in the high capacity desktop drive market. We have previously had the opportunity to
test out Seagate?s flagship drive from the 7200.8 series and now we are about to see what the new generation brings to
the table.
Manufacturer: Seagate
Model: Barracuda 7200.9 500GB
Price: $432US (?369)
Supplied by: Seagate
Specifications:
- Complete family of capacities up to 500 Gbytes
- 7200-RPM spin speed
- Cache memory available in 2-, 8-, and 16- Mbyte options (depending on capacity)
- SATA 3Gb/s interface with NCQ and many more SATA features
- Also available in ATA/100 interface options
- Best-in-class drive acoustics
- Average Seek (msec) = 8.5
- Shock, Operating (Gs) = 63
- Shock, Nonoperating (Gs) = 300
- Acoustics, Idle (bels) = 2.8
Features and Benefits:
- Highest available capacity: Up to one half terabyte (500Gbytes), enabling OEMs and system builders to qualify one
family of drives from a trusted supplier for a wide range of personal storage, entry-level servers and low cost nearline
storage solutions
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- SATA 3Gb/s interface offers blazing fast 300Mbytes/sec interface speed combined with Native Command Queuing
(NCQ) for high performance and fast data transfer rates
- Additional SATA features such as hot plug, staggered spin-up, drive LED capable, backward compatible with SATA
1.5Gb/s hosts, and compatible with new SATA ClickConnect connectors
- A proven design for shorter qualification times and top reliability
- Rugged drives with industry-leading operating and nonoperating shock specifications
- Unprecedented 5-year warranty
Specifications and Features: 4.5/5
{mospagebreak title=The Drive}
The Drive:
On the outside there isn?t much to look at on a hard drive. You see a metal box with a label on the top, a circuit board on
the bottom, and some plugs on the end. Seagate for a couple of generations now has dropped the Molex connector and
only uses the SATA power connector. Since all new power supplies come with at least two of these connectors and
sometimes four, I shed no tears with the disappearance of the Molex connector.
Fortunately for us end users the insides of all hard drives are not as similar as the outsides. Seagate boasts the
industries highest areal density with up to 160GB per platter. With such a high platter capacity there are fewer platters
needed as well as fewer read/write heads, this leaves less room for errors to occur. This move to larger platters also
improves performance with less seek time since there are fewer places for data to be stored on the drive.
The next move Seagate made was with the increased cache size from 8MB to 16MB. With the days of Gigabyte?s and
now even Terabyte's here, a difference of 8MB doesn?t sound like much but when you consider all it has to do, the
performance gain is impressive. When you look at the most commonly accessed files on a computer most of them are
only a few KB, so having many more of these files cached adds a great deal to the responsiveness as well as cutting
down on the number of times the drive needs to spin up to access these files.
Next up comes the third generation of NCQ (Native Command Queuing). NCQ allows commands to be dynamically
reordered so that they are retrieved or written to the hard drive in the most effective order. This cuts down on the back
and forth movement of the read/write heads and allows more data to be read/written on one pass. NCQ enabled
7,200rpm drives have shown to offer the performance increase that a jump to a 10,000rpm spindle speed would offer.
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The jump from ATA to SATA was minimal, 100Mb/s/133Mb/s to 150Mb/s was barely felt. The jump to SATA 3G finally
made a decent size move going from 150Mb/s to 300Mb/s. Finally we have opened up the highway and increased the
speed limits. Transfer speeds are increasing and the burden of the hard drive being the bottle neck is finally lifting.
Where would we be with out 500GB of storage space on a single hard drive? Only a few short years ago I recall paying
$400 for a 60GB hard drive and was sure that I would never need another. Well times have changed and today I still
have that same 60GB drive running in a system with two other drives (80GB and 120GB). A few months ago I was
writing a review about Seagate?s 400GB 7200.8 drive and I mentioned a downside as not being 500GB, well here is the
500GB drive and there is no mention on the horizon yet of anything larger. The only question from here is what will be
next? 600GB, 1TB.
Temperature wise the 7200.9 drive operates close to the temperature of most other drives. External temperature of the
drive is around 30-35?C. As for the noise the drives are very quiet. Some minor clicks can be heard under heavy use but
there is no noise given off when the drive is idle.
The Drive: 4.8/5
{mospagebreak title=Performance}
Performance:
To test the performance of this drive, I ran it as a single system drive and then again as a RAID 0 system drive. I
compared the results to a pair of Samsung SATA 3G drives in RAID 0 and the previous generation Seagate 7200.8.
Tests used for this included SiSoft Sandra HDD Benchmark, PCMark05 HDD Suite, and HDTach. Additionally I timed the
load screens in Battlefield 2 to show real world performance.
Sandra
Seagate 7200.8 Seagate 7200.9 Samsung RAID Seagate RAID
Sandra shows some mixed results, the 7200.9 scores a lower drive index but clearly has a much higher buffered read
and write. For this I would give credit to the 16MB cache on the drive. For the RAID tests the two sets of drives scored
very closely in drive index but the Samsung scored higher is almost every category. The increased cache of the Seagate
did not seem to help performance out as much in a RAID setup.
PCMark05
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Seagate 7200.8 Seagate 7200.9 Samsung RAID Seagate RAID
In PCMark05 the two single drives showed a nice improvement for the newer model over the previous generation. In the
final two categories (Virus Scan and File Write) the 7200.9 showed its performance with a healthy lead over the 7200.8.
Once the RAID 0 pairs were finished running PCMark05, I was shocked to see the results. The Samsung pair's
performance was less then that of the single Seagate 7200.9 drive by a small margin. The RAID 0 pair of Seagates
showed a large increase over all of the other comparison scores.
HDTach
Seagate 7200.8 Seagate 7200.9 Samsung RAID Seagate RAID
HDTach results turned out about where I had expected them too, again showing the Seagate 7200.9 as the leader of the
test group. This lead is evident after looking at the 7200.8 versus the 7200.9 results. The RAID 0 results show this same
lead over the single drives as well as the Samsung pair.
Battlefield 2
For a little bit of real world experience, I loaded a fresh copy of Battlefield 2 onto each drive and installed the latest 1.03
game patch. I then loaded a single player game and timed how long it would take to load each level. This was done with
the default settings, I tried with different settings and the times did not change.
The Seagate drives show a very nice decrease in load times from the other two test drives however the jump from a
single drive to RAID 0 was very limited.
Performance: 4.5/5
{mospagebreak title=Price/Warranty}
Price / Warranty:
The 500GB Barracuda 7200.9 drive has a MSRP of $432 US and is currently available on NewEgg.com for $371.50.
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This is by no means a cheap drive but when you consider the amount of storage that it gives you it is a pretty good deal.
Using the NewEgg price you are paying about $0.75 per GByte. That is quite a bit higher then standard SATA drives are
going for, but you get performance similar to 10,000RPM drives that cost much more per GByte. If the 500GByte version
doesn?t fit your budget, Seagate offers drives in the 7200.9 series starting at $57 for a 40GByte PATA or $75 for the
80GByte SATA model.
Seagate offers an impressive 5 year warranty on all of their hard drives. RMA service can be initiated on Seagate?s
website under the Support tab.
Price / Warranty: 4.5/5
{mospagebreak title=Conclusion}
Conclusion:
After using these drives for over a week I have noticed an increased responsiveness in my system. Games and
applications are loading faster; even Windows seems a bit quicker. Then there is the little bit of extra hard drive space
that I now have. When running together in a RAID 0 array I have a 931GB hard drive according to Windows. That should
be plenty of space to keep me going for a while.
Pros:
- 500GBytes
- SATA 3G
- 16MB cache
- Very fast
Cons:
- Possibly too expensive for the average user
Specifications and Features: 4.5/5
Drive Usage: 4.8/5
Performance: 4.5/5
Price / Warranty: 4.5/5
Overall: 18.3/20
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We would like to thank Mike Hall at Seagate for donating the hardware for this review.
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