Seagate 7200.12 500Gb impressions

warriorpoet · Post by **warriorpoet** » Tue Feb 03, 2009 8:19 pm

I decided to add an internal 500Gb to my recording machine to go along with the external 2 Tb RAID array. In doing my research I came across the 7200.12 drives with 500Gb platters. How useful!

It's been my experience single-platter drives tend to vibrate less and have less spin-up noise, so I had high hopes when I opened the Newegg box with all my other goodies.

I'm not disappointed. I've had this drive running for two weeks now and it's even quieter than the 160 Samsung Spinpoint next to it. Sitting on the desk I had the chance to gauge, to some extent, the vibration and operation noise of the drive out of the quiet-box p180. To be honest, vibration in my sample seems near-nonexistent. idle noise is very, very soft, and seeks are noticeable, but barely-- far more muted than the WDs I had in his machine before.

One oddity- the drive is ridiculously thin for a 3.5" drive. Its small height is certainly useful for tight quarters, but it was certainly unexpected.

I hope SPCR gets the chance to review these things soon

lemmy · Post by **lemmy** » Tue Feb 03, 2009 10:09 pm

That's nice to hear. My primary PC sits in the main area of the house and I've been looking to upgrade my drives. The price point is very good as well. Quiet is the key though.

Seagate drives for me have been so hit/miss as of late. I guess it may be time to look at them again.

warriorpoet · Post by **warriorpoet** » Wed Feb 04, 2009 7:55 am

lemmy wrote:That's nice to hear. My primary PC sits in the main area of the house and I've been looking to upgrade my drives. The price point is very good as well. Quiet is the key though.

Seagate drives for me have been so hit/miss as of late. I guess it may be time to look at them again.

That's been my experience as far as acoustics are concerned, but they've always been very reliable for me. Reliability is key, and Samsung and Seagate are the only brands with which I've never experienced a failure.

This drive is simply the quietest desktop drive I've ever used. I hope it turns out to be as reliable as I've come to expect from Seagate.

Mine sits at eye level on a desk in our living room, so yes, quiet as key here too

fyleow · Post by **fyleow** » Thu Feb 05, 2009 12:32 am

Quieter than the Samsung is a really good sign. I'm still on the fence about getting one. I currently have the Samsung Spinpoint T 320 GB and don't need the extra space but I wouldn't mind the performance boost.

lemmy · Post by **lemmy** » Thu Feb 05, 2009 9:28 am

I have 2 of them in my saved basket on Newegg at the moment. I'm going to wait till the end of the month for a few more reviews to come in.

My music collection and multiboot scenario has made it necessary to find larger drives.

warriorpoet · Post by **warriorpoet** » Fri Feb 06, 2009 2:36 pm

lemmy wrote:I have 2 of them in my saved basket on Newegg at the moment. I'm going to wait till the end of the month for a few more reviews to come in.

My music collection and multiboot scenario has made it necessary to find larger drives.

I might just make a couple audio recordings at 1' while I have the workstation up. It might be helpful to post a comparison between the known (Samsung) and unknown (Seagate). Maybe you guys have suggestions for even more benign drives

thejamppa · Post by **thejamppa** » Fri Feb 06, 2009 3:35 pm

It would be great if Seagate would be back on the track with quiet drives... Looks promising. I will wait SPCR tests ^^

Auroa · Post by **Auroa** » Fri Feb 06, 2009 7:58 pm

I'd be very interested to see how it compares to the single platter Samsung and Western Digital offerings, e.g. Samsung F1 320GB, WD3200AAKS.

ekerazha · Post by **ekerazha** » Tue Feb 17, 2009 4:45 am

Some tests...

RAID0 2 x Seagate Barracuda 7200.12, 500 GB, 1-platter, ST3500418AS

Source: http://www.pcsilenzioso.it/forum/showpo ... ostcount=1

Seagate Barracuda 7200.12, 500 GB, 1-platter, ST3500418AS
Source: http://www.xcpus.com/GetDoc.aspx?doc=123&page=1

There's also a ST3500410AS model that from the specs ( http://www.seagate.com/staticfiles/supp ... 29369a.pdf ) is quieter, but I don't know about the differences.

Matija · Post by **Matija** » Tue Feb 17, 2009 4:58 am

What's delaying the rest of the .12 lineup? They can release 1.0, 1.5 and 2.0 TB drives...

Redzo · Post by **Redzo** » Tue Feb 17, 2009 5:56 am

Nice to hear that 7200.12 are quiet but since Seagate messed up big time with their firmware I decided to stay away from that brand for at least couple of years. My data is important to me...

Matija · Post by **Matija** » Tue Feb 17, 2009 7:20 am

Redzo wrote:Nice to hear that 7200.12 are quiet but since Seagate messed up big time with their firmware I decided to stay away from that brand for at least couple of years. My data is important to me...

That's exactly why you should go with Seagate now.

After the .11 fiasco, they have checked, double-checked and triple-checked all firmwares on all drives, so that it doesn't happen again.

intx · Post by **intx** » Wed Feb 18, 2009 5:15 pm

Matija wrote:
Redzo wrote:Nice to hear that 7200.12 are quiet but since Seagate messed up big time with their firmware I decided to stay away from that brand for at least couple of years. My data is important to me...
That's exactly why you should go with Seagate now.

After the .11 fiasco, they have checked, double-checked and triple-checked all firmwares on all drives, so that it doesn't happen again.

You'd think so.

The first Seagate 7200.11 firmware patch actually bricked certain drives that were working perfectly fine before!

Seagate is another one of those companies that too caught up in making more money that they stopped caring about standards.

The only way quality will prevail over cost, is if consumers really made a statement by not buying their products anymore.

Products have lower quality standards these days because the majority of consumers focus on price above quality. Can't really blame Seagate for just giving the majority what they want.

Redzo · Post by **Redzo** » Wed Feb 18, 2009 5:26 pm

Matija wrote:
Redzo wrote:Nice to hear that 7200.12 are quiet but since Seagate messed up big time with their firmware I decided to stay away from that brand for at least couple of years. My data is important to me...
That's exactly why you should go with Seagate now.

After the .11 fiasco, they have checked, double-checked and triple-checked all firmwares on all drives, so that it doesn't happen again.

My point is that they at first ignored the problem. Ppl that complained got ignored... until media picked upp on it. I will not sponsor a company that has an attitude like that towards its customers. And as I said my data is very important to me. Much more important then computer itself.

Here is what one of Seagate own employees had to say about whole firmware fiasco:
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid= ... d=26542735

lemmy · Post by **lemmy** » Wed Feb 18, 2009 8:11 pm

Oh wow - that is an interesting post on slashdot. There's just no way to candy-coat a situation like that.

ekerazha · Post by **ekerazha** » Mon Mar 02, 2009 6:12 am

techreport.com reviewed the 1 TB model: http://techreport.com/articles.x/16472

My opinion after reading the review:
- Very quiet
- Good reading performance
- Below average writing performance

Matija · Post by **Matija** » Mon Mar 02, 2009 6:32 am

Jesus, it's slow... It even gets pwned by the GP in some of the tests. They have really killed it through slowing down access time

Too bad...

FartingBob · Post by **FartingBob** » Mon Mar 02, 2009 7:03 am

Yea the 2TB version at least is very hit and miss. It does well in some synthetic tests (particularly read which seagate always seems to focus on because it gives them the biggest number to write on the box) but awful in access times, IOPS, boot times and most importantly it sucked donkey balls when it came to writing, being slower even than the 5400rpm GP's and even the 2 year old 5-platter deskstar.

This is a step backwards from a performance POV, which is very strange since it brings such high density spinning at 7200rpm. But then we've seen this from seagate before, being great in sequential read tests but average to poor in many other (arguably more important) tests.
At least this has very good power consumption and should be pretty quiet.

Matija · Post by **Matija** » Mon Mar 02, 2009 8:01 am

I honestly wanted that drive to be my next purchase, but I think I'm going to get a Samsung instead. This is just... Disappointing.

Pliskin · Post by **Pliskin** » Mon Mar 02, 2009 9:51 am

I guess theres not much chance of the 500gb being much better is there. I've ordered 3 500gb for my new system. I plan to raid 0 two of them for my boot drive and then use the other one for storage. Hopefully it wont be too bad, most reviews and tests of the 500gb seem to fair better. Well, none the less, it will be better than my current 3 year old drive.