X-bit labs

Mega Roundup 2: Twenty Two Hard Disk Drives with 120GB Storage Capacity (page 6)

Category: Storage

by Alexey Volkov , Nikita Nikolaichev

[ 05/09/2004 | 10:05 AM ]

The next manufacturer is Seagate:

And the graphs:

Unlike the drives from other manufacturers, we can single out a leader among Seagate’s products. It is the ST3120026AS model!

As you remember, Seagate sharply segmented the Barracuda 7200.7 family into three sub-families:

• “desktop” or Barracuda 7200.7;
• “performance” or Barracuda 7200.7 Plus;
• “server” or Barracuda 7200.7 SATA.

Products of the first two sub-families differ between themselves in the amount of cache memory. The 8MB buffer of Barracuda 7200.7 Plus drives really boosted their performance across a number of tasks.

Meanwhile, the drives of the third sub-family had a much better access time, although were loud at work… Well, you had to choose between speed and silence. Products of the Barracuda 7200.7 SATA series were intended for powerful workstations and entry-level servers, so the quietness was sacrificed for performance.

Among other drives, I’d like to single out the ST3120024A model (Barracuda ATA V), which was fast enough in modes with a high writes percentage.

The drives remained on their respective positions under this workload. Curiously enough, the ST3120024A lost to others at 100% reading, but took its second place after that to never leave it.

So, let’s push the load to the maximum.

The drives split into two pairs under the 256 requests workload: the ex-outsiders ST3120026A and the ST3120022A were the leaders at 100% reading, but lost to the other pair of drives at 20% writes.