new models from Seagate/Samsung around the corner?

Silencing hard drives, optical drives and other storage devices

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dan
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new models from Seagate/Samsung around the corner?

Post by dan » Tue Mar 23, 2004 12:07 pm

hi,

i am writing this post on March 23, 2004.

i remember when seagate introduced the barracuda IV, followed by V, followed by the 7200.7, in annual succession. Fairly quickly.

Samsung introduced the sp80 about a year ago.

since in the past seagate introduced new models on a yearly basis, and it's been a year or more since the 7200.7 has been introduced, is seagate or samsung planning a successor to 7200.7 or sp80

-- one that hopefully is even more quiet (both idle whine and seek noise)?

i know seagate is moving to 100gb platter. time for new model?

i ask b/c i can wait a couple of weeks to months for new and hopefully more quiet models to upgrade to. (from my western digital 60BB-- horribly noisy)

dan

dukla2000
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Post by dukla2000 » Tue Mar 23, 2004 2:32 pm

I've been figuring the same thing. Seagate slipped one 100Mb/platter drive into the 7200.7 range a few months ago but since then nothing.

Figure we are due for some movement to really benefit from SATA as well - rev 1 is now old hat.

My prediction (Eeyore!) is the announcements will be the day after I buy my next drive :wink:

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Post by DonP » Tue Mar 23, 2004 4:06 pm

dukla2000 wrote:My prediction (Eeyore!) is the announcements will be the day after I buy my next drive :wink:
Well hurry up and buy the drive already.. then we'll all be able to buy newly released drives two days after you bought your old one :)

Or.. for the greater good we could all split the cost of an old one, as long as you perform the actual purchase. Then.. and this is the clever bit.. we could sell the old drive on EBay?! huh, huh? wodja think?

:D

Seriously though.. would be good to see something new.. I saw some talk recently (?) of 10k RPM 2.5" disks.. whoa!?! no idea how quiet.. but I wouldn't expect a quiet 10k RPM. Oh.. and I think they are Ultra 320 SCSI.. which is the first time I've seen SCSI on a 2.5" drive.

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Post by Edward Ng » Tue Mar 23, 2004 5:11 pm

My bad... I'm wrong. They're U320 SCSI...this bodes well! U320 drives are backwards compatible with LSI Logic's extremely affordable LSIU160 U160 PCI SCSI adapter, which is not only, as I said, highly affordble (under $50!!!), but bootable, and most important of all, Windows XP includes native drivers for it!!!

Can't wait for them to come out!

-Ed

EDIT: Fixed the error in statement.
Last edited by Edward Ng on Tue Mar 23, 2004 9:46 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Talz
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Post by Talz » Tue Mar 23, 2004 9:32 pm

Seagates been talking about pushing 2.5" enterprise drives for awhile, I'm guessing it'll be a few months after Savvio is actually released before they have anything really interesting for the mainstream. A PATA or at least a SATA version of the Savvio definately would be interesting if performance and noise is what I'm guessing it will be.

aston
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Post by aston » Tue Mar 23, 2004 10:09 pm

I'm looking forward to some new drives, too. I need more space and I don't want to add any more drives to the system. 120GB per disk just isn't cutting it anymore...

dan
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roadmap

Post by dan » Tue Mar 23, 2004 10:15 pm

personally i'm surprised that there isn't a roadmap of expected products for both samsung and seagate.

i still can't find the 8mb cache samsung sp80 single platter 80gb (sp812N)

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Post by dukla2000 » Fri Apr 09, 2004 8:47 am

DonP wrote:
dukla2000 wrote:My prediction (Eeyore!) is the announcements will be the day after I buy my next drive :wink:
Well hurry up and buy the drive already.. then we'll all be able to buy newly released drives two days after you bought your old one :)
Watch out for the announcements next week. (Just started some video recording stuff, ran out of disk space in a hurry and had to buy a new drive - SP0812C is now in place.)

Lone Ranger
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Post by Lone Ranger » Fri Apr 09, 2004 8:55 am

I would dearly like to know when Samsung will release a larger capacity drive than the current 160 GB one.

Prefereably the larger drive would not be bigger than two platters.

Does anyone have any info on this?

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Post by Edward Ng » Fri Apr 09, 2004 9:11 am

The only dual platter drive larger than 160GB that's available right this very moment is Seagate's Barracuda 7200.7 Plus ST3200822A (and its SATA brother, the ST3200822AS); they're based on 100GB/platter technology.

-Ed

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Post by Lone Ranger » Sat Apr 10, 2004 3:19 am

Edward Ng wrote:The only dual platter drive larger than 160GB that's available right this very moment is Seagate's Barracuda 7200.7 Plus ST3200822A (and its SATA brother, the ST3200822AS); they're based on 100GB/platter technology.

-Ed
Maybe I will have to compromise on a requirement of having only two platters to keep the noise and heat down.

Do you or anyone else here know how much extra noise and heat the addition of a third platter would create?

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Post by Edward Ng » Sat Apr 10, 2004 4:03 am

It's known to be approximately 2 to 3 dB per platter, depending on the design.

-Ed

buan

120 GB per platter

Post by buan » Tue May 25, 2004 5:19 pm

Lone Ranger wrote:I would dearly like to know when Samsung will release a larger capacity drive than the current 160 GB one.

Prefereably the larger drive would not be bigger than two platters.

Does anyone have any info on this?
I contacted Samsung back in October 2003 regarding larger drives, and a 240GB SpinPoint model in particular. The answer was that it would take a "relatively long time" before larger drives were to hit the market.

Regarding the 240GB SpinPoint:
"This product will have 120GB/platter. The industry
has just incorparated 80GB/platter with difficulties"

dan
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Post by dan » Tue May 25, 2004 8:34 pm

wow!!!
this is such an old post!!!

actually my question was more about whether samsung/seagate would introduce models even more quiet than the SP80! i'm relatively indifferent about platter size as 40GB is more than enough for my needs!

boy intel is having transition to 90nm, and i can't believe 120gb is the next stop...seagate is selling 100gb platter models. i guess the industry and moore's law is finally grinding to a halt.

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Post by Rusty075 » Tue May 25, 2004 8:59 pm

Seagate has had new products since the 7200.7:

The revised SATA 7200.7 with NCQ is supposed to be shipping soon. Won't do much for noise, but it will boost performance. (Seagate demo'd a 7200.7 NCQ outperforming one of their own 10K Cheetah SCSI drives.

They also introduced their new Savvio drives. 2.5" , 10,000RPM, higher performance than the 7200.7, etc, etc. (it also appears on paper at least to be louder: 2.4Bels compared to 2.2 for the 7200.7)

Seagate has pretty openly hinted that the future is, in fact, 2.5" wide. I wouldn't be surprised if the 7200.7 is the last of their 3.5" SATA line.

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Post by dan » Wed May 26, 2004 8:00 am

well here's an observation

if 7200.7 is 2.2 bels, then it would be more quiet than samsung sp80 at 2.7 bels idle, which is contrary to what spcr and its reviewers have been stating.

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Post by Edward Ng » Wed May 26, 2004 8:08 am

Those numbers are always hard to go by, because different manufacturers use different testing procedures; for example, Samsung may be measuring noise pressure level with the microphone much closer to the drive than Seagate does; in fact, if two different Seagate drives are developed in two different labs, those testing procedures could differ as well!

Generally speaking, this is part of the reason we're here, as a community. We (well, Mike) use(s) a standardized set of procedures, with controlled parameters, to test all drives on an even keel (sic?); which is something we honestly cannot expect of the companies to do, since they all operate on different philosophies, procedures, equipment etc.

-Ed

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Post by dan » Wed May 26, 2004 10:56 pm

hi ed
and the reason i read and reply and make posts is to learn more about silent computing.

it's my understanding NCQ requires SATA-II.

i'm glad you and mike can do these tests. I take it you make money on advertising.

gosh, it's now almost June, and no word from either seagate or samsung about any successors to 7200.7 or sp80.

personally i'm waiting for SP2 to be released before i buy a new HD.

it is my hope that both find ways to make their HD's even more quiet and more energy-efficient, whether better FDB, better sound-supressing materials, etc.

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Post by Edward Ng » Thu May 27, 2004 4:55 am

Actually, according to Mike, SPCR is a not-for-profit site; all proceeds from advertising go into making the site run...

Personally I am doing this to learn, myself; I take the time and energy to share my findings with you guys, as a community, primarily, well, to get my name out, I suppose. However, there's no profit in this for me; actually, I've spent a very big deal of money on the whole quest for silence! :lol:

Technically, SATA I standard supports native tagged command queuing; the issue is that most controllers on the market (some, oh, 90%) do not have this feature yet. Another issue is that the majority of SATA hard drives on the market are merely PATA-based drives with onboard SATA conversions (even Western Digital's Raptors!!!), and thus, it is extremely difficult to implement TCQ/NCQ on those drives.

This is probably the reason why it is said that it won't be until SATA II that NCQ becomes standard; perhaps it is mandatory, unlike standard SATA I.

The drive I am most interested in, actually, are the Seagate Savvios. If they can perform as well as I hope they can (acoustically), then they're definitely in the running for highest performance drive at (dead) silenceable noise levels.

-Ed

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Post by nutball » Thu May 27, 2004 5:05 am

Edward Ng wrote:Technically, SATA I standard supports native tagged command queuing; the issue is that most controllers on the market (some, oh, 90%) do not have this feature yet. Another issue is that the majority of SATA hard drives on the market are merely PATA-based drives with onboard SATA conversions (even Western Digital's Raptors!!!), and thus, it is extremely difficult to implement TCQ/NCQ on those drives.
Is it the controllers or the drives that are the issue here? Or both? My understanding was that it's the drives that do the re-ordering of commands.

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Post by Edward Ng » Thu May 27, 2004 6:21 am

The issue is with both...

The drives must have the capabilities to receive and, "understand," the necessary data from the controller in order to determine just how to place the seeks out-of-order. There's more to it than just seeking in a straight line, and the amount of data fetched plus a myriad other things needs to be known before proper out-of-order execution can be set up. The controller needs to send additional information for this to happen; otherwise, it wouldn't have any clue what the heck is going on when the data comes back to it from the drive out-of-order.

Thus, the drives, as well as the controllers, must support TCQ. This is part of the reason why the TCQ built into the 180GXP series from IBM/HGST never really went into much, if any use; the only controllers supporting TCQ on those PATA drives were custom ones built by IBM for their own machines and for special commercial machines for their partners!

-Ed

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Post by dan » Thu May 27, 2004 8:43 am

how much of a performance increase does NCQ offer?

for me the savvio line is rather expensive, but i hope samsung updates the sp80 not only to be more quiet but offer NCQ.

is samsung sp80's native serial ata or is it use a bridge

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Post by Edward Ng » Thu May 27, 2004 9:05 am

I am unsure as to whether Samsung's drives are native SATA, or merely converted PATA drives, sorry. I will check StorageReview.Com's reviews for a SATA Samsung; they probably will have that info.

The extent to which NCQ can improve performance really varies, depending on your usage. People who multitask and work with lots of small files from different applications at the same time will stand to benefit most. Single-application A/V users who work in only one app at a time, with one or two extremely large files at a time, doesn't stand to gain much from it, like sitting there running filters on a single 300MB, 1200dpi CMYK Photoshop file. If you find yourself in AIM, Word, Excel, WinAmp, Outlook and Internet Explorer all at once, there's definitely a gain to be found!

-Ed

EDIT: Okay, checked SR but they don't have any info on the SATA SpinPoints. I also noticed in their Raptor review that Raptor, while running off a bridge, does support TCQ! However, SR indicates, as I figured, that to date, there have been no controllers released with TCQ support, so it's still moot point.

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