Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 500GB, Single 500GB Platter

[onethreehill]

Seagate's Barracuda 7200.12 ST31000528AS 1TB 32MB Hard Drive Review

One of the most remarkable things about the storage industry is the fact that, although today's hard drives are much faster than those from yesteryear, they're still spinning at the same spindle speeds. 7,200 RPM has been the standard for desktop drives for a very long time now, supplanted only occasionally by enthusiast-oriented Raptors spinning their platters at 10,000 RPM. The enterprise world has managed to crank spindles up to 15,000 RPM, but that step up the rotational speed ladder happened more than nine years ago. Drives haven't spun their platters any faster since.

Rather than relying on higher spindle speeds to sustain a steady diet of incremental performance improvements, hard drive makers have instead increased the precision and speed with which drives can flow data back and forth to their spinning media. The amount of data stored on those spinning platters has grown, as well, and at an exponential rate. In just the last two years, we've seen platter capacities jump from 200GB to 250, 333, 375, and now 500GB.

Source: Techreport

[sabe]

he mentions a few times that the 7200.12 are nice and quiet, then someone says..might be AAM making it so nice and quiet + wrecking the seek times

I tried adjusting the AAM using HD Tune Pro 3.5, but I cannot adjust the settings on the 7200.12, they jump straight back to the lowest acoustics mode.

[hollo]

yea, i saw that in the techreport review

We've also learned that Seagate has optimized the 7200.12's seek mechanism to lower acoustics. This so-called "quiet" seek mode is set at the factory and can't be adjusted by end users, and it has some significant performance implications that will become clear on the following pages.

sad for people who want to make high performance RAID arrays out of them, the western digital single-platter 320GB drive had the same "problem" - it was optimised for low power consumption and volume. maybe samsung will make a high performance 500GB single-platter drive for us, like the HD322HJ

[mstp2009]

As promised, here is our review:
http://www.xcpus.com/GetDoc.aspx?doc=137&page=1


Honestly, for the jump in platter density from 333GB/p to 500GB/p, I was very disappointed not to see this drive perform better. It only edges out the 7200.11, instead of crushing it.

[XS Janus]

I'm getting one for my NAS server tomorrow.
My 500Gb GreenPower Wd is crumbling under torrent, unzip, file copy tasks...