Good to see Seagate is doing stuff in the right direction. First they finally fix faulty drives and now make their 1.5TB Barracuda better. The revolution has begun!

2nd to last paragraph of review should read:

"(Western Digital now has a 2TB Green Power)"

...not:

"(Western Digital now has a 2GB Green Power)"

Was searching for "2GB Green Power" and couldn't figure out why I wasn't getting any hits!

An improvement, but not good enough to regain its title of best drive maker around (it sure seems a while since it had that badge as well). 2TB Greenpowers should be shipping in the coming few weeks accoridng to most sites which will eliminate the biggest selling point for this drive (highest capacity).

Or perhaps you had too many "hits" if you get my drift and I think you do (he said in a friendly and well meaning way)
sorry, couldn't resist.

Unfortunately, the 2TB Green Powers are selling for $299 right now...

Fixed. I think in my head I was thinking "GP."

I've been eying the Seagate 1.5TB drive since it was released late last summer. But I've also been reading the travails of owners at Seagate's community forum and Newegg customer reviews. It's not worth the risk to me.

Obviously increasing platter densities are going to mean increasing sequential read speeds, and that is not the point of Velociraptor.

Velociraptor = a drive that can do 7ms random access. That's the point of Velociraptor. It's not going to get rivaled in that category too soon by any other spinning SATA drive. In fact I think it's not going to get rivalled at all until this use case is totally dominated by SSD drives in the future.

Seagate also announced the Barracuda 7200.12 series: http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/produc ... a_7200.12/

They should be 500 GB per-platter.

^ Very suspicious that they ship in 250GB, 500GB, 750GB and 1TB capacities. Also they claim upt o 160MB/s sustained on the webpage, but the datasheet says 125...

I don't get it, the noise levels are 6 dB lower than WD black, is it really that much more quiet or did you test en drive in that fancy chamber of yours and one at some other place? I would like to se it compared to the GP you previously reviewed.

Not suspicious at all - drive manufactures have been shipping disks which only use one side of a platter for ages - I suspect that they take platters which have defects on only one side and use those as single-sided platters rather than throw them in the circular file.

All the drives listed on the comparison table were tested in the chamber. We don't have a GP to re-test atm.

I suggest you listen to the recordings for a better sense of the noise level difference.

Thanks for the explanation, I actually haven't heard that before. I previously assumed that if a platter was going to have enough defects on one side to call it a write-off, odds are the other side isn't in much better shape (ie: good enough to use).

Is there really any point in reviewing disk based storage anymore?

With all the wonderful SSD options out there (Intel, Mtron and maybe the new models from OCZ to name a few) I can't see what the point is for SPCR spending time on the noisy & warm HDD options.

Sure, it is cheaper. But this forum is all about noise, not price. (Correct me if I'm wrong on this point)

2.5" hard disks offer a very good compromise between noise and cost/GB. Not all of us are millionaires, and have substantial storage requirements, where SSDs are still inadequate.

I just think that having a server w lots of space on traditional HDDs hidden away where noise isn't a problem, and a small SSD w the just the OS on the computer I use is a better solution.

A small SSD is not that expensive either.

I'd say there is always a trade off. price vs performance vs noise. and thats why there is still a point to these reviews.

so me - I'm upgrading my server storage box, looking for a new big drive. and its sits in my office where I can hear it. I have been using samsung spinpoints (have 1x500G, 2x1T) to date, looking to see if the competition has caught up. So noise is still an issue for a 3.5" drive. hence why I read this review.

in my htpc in the tv room I currently have a 3.5" (which I'm finding too noisy), about to change for a 2.5" and put the 3.5" in the office server.
the htpc might become an SSD eventually when prices drop more. right now, SSD is too much money for the size. One that will hold my base OS and no more is over 100GBP. I can't buy one big enough to hold my media without selling my house

so for me - silence/performance/price of storage of all drive types is still very much relevant.

Ian

The cheapest SSD's arent too expesnive sure, but they have pretty poor performance and are slower than the latest HDD's in many tasks. At the moment you need to go pretty high end SSD's to get a decent improvement across the field comapred to the best mechanical drives, and at that point its not good value for money.
For a silence and cooling POV cheap SSD's are good, but still i dont think paying 10x the $/GB is worth saving ~5w.

I have 2 rooms in my aparment, a living- and a bedroom. Where would you propose I put this server?

good gbit switches/routers are expensive too

uhm... hanging outside the window?

Okay, I see your point.

(I put mine in the basement.)

I just got a couple of the 1TB 3 platter 7200.11 models, (one which has much newer firmware and one which has updated firmware), looks like they're as quiet as advertised. I still had a couple old 7200.10's and the noise difference is absolutely amazing. The 7200.11 that were unmounted and outside were still way quieter than the 7200.10's inside my case. My guess is the drives are still louder than any fan, but now it's a lot harder to tell. Unfortunately there is some loss of access speed, but I think a couple ms of extra access time is worth the silence. Sounds like the 7200.12 drives have the same access time issue as well.

Well I got one of these drives for a new system im putting together and found the thing runs Very Hot.

Granted it wasnt in a case, but just sitting on my desk for bench testing -- Tthe drive became almost too hot to touch while it was formatting.

Anyone know if this is normal?

-- yes im planning on putting it in a case with cooling and such, but if it gets this hot in such a short time im worried i may have to reorganize things to have a dedicated fan.

I'm surprised about the hotness. My 7200.11 1tb's are actually 5 degrees less than my old 7200.10 4 platter(which btw is way way louder). Not sure if it's normal or not. I guess it's possible that the 4 platter 7200.11 is a bit hotter. I was getting temps around 33-34 degrees inside my case. Outside I'd expect a bit worse as there's no moving air.