Seagate

It’s time now for the Seagate crew to enter the scene:

It’s hard to read such tables – we prefer watching diagrams:

The graphs are indicative of the dependence of the performance on the firmware version. Seagate’s SATA drives are evidently faster than their PATA analogs. Well, we already discussed this fact in a separate review, so it’s more interesting to clear out the situation with different firmware versions.

For example, the ST3160023AS model showed its highest speed in this test with firmware 3.05, and, accidentally, it was the fastest of all the Seagate drives! Curiously, the later versions of the firmware (3.14 and 3.18) fell behind the leader in high-percentage-of-writes modes as well as in the random read mode.

As for the PATA devices, the ST3160021A and the ST3160023A with firmware 3.06 perform much alike. Probably, the same firmware has a greater effect on the performance than the amount of cache memory on board.

We increase the load…

The drives remained at their positions, only the gaps have grown somewhat. It’s clear that the ST3160021A works a little slower with firmware 3.04 than with firmware 3.06, while the ST3160023A with firmware 3.71 has a strong dislike toward write operations.

All the drives did equally well in the random read mode here but the SATA-interfaced disk is ahead as soon as there appear write requests in the queue. We can put it in another way: “the PATA disks slow down on write operations”.