Storage Giant: Seagate’s Barracuda 180 — THG.RU

Storage Giant: Seagate’s Barracuda 180

Not so long ago Seagate released the Cheetah X15, and they have another surprise for us. The ST1181677LWV is by far the largest hard drive that the world has ever seen. With a capacity of 180 GB, it is more than twice as large as the previous record-holders, Maxtor’s DiamondMax 80 and Western Digital’s WD800BB drive. In terms of capacity, both of these IDE drives lose the crown to Seagate’s new SCSI drive.

The amount of platters had to be increased considerably in order to reach this formidable capacity. As a result, the Barracuda 180 makes use of 12 discs, which, because of the sheer amount, can no longer be placed in a standard 1″ high case. To install this drive, you will therefore require two free 3.5″ drive bays.

Technical Data

Find the detailed technical specifications on Seagate’s website.

Rotational Speed

Nowadays, the common speed for SCSI drives is 10,000 rpm, which allows for increased data transfer speed as well as reduced latency and access times. While the first generations of fast drives had to be cooled meticulously to maintain a safe temperature and ensure a longer lifetime, today’s drives — just like this one — merely require adequate airflow to disperse any heat that is generated.

Temperature

As soon as a disk begins rotating, the friction increases the temperature of the hard drive. At 10,000 and 15,000 rpm, the friction is enough to increase drive temperatures up to 5 degrees Centigrade. The storage industry has developed different strategies to reduce friction and temperature considerably. Still, the amount of platters in a hard drive has a huge impact on a drive’s temperature — the more platters you use, the more difficult it is to get rid of the heat.

The best example of higher temperature due to a larger amount of platters is the IBM DTLA DeskStar 75GXP. This family of drives is available at 15, 30, 45, 60 and 75 GB, using between 1 and 5 platters at 15 GB per platter. The 75 GB drive heats up faster and stays slightly warmer than, for example, a 15 or 30 GB model. From this, we can see that Seagate had to be careful when designing their Barracuda 180 with 12 platters, which is far more than the 75 GB IBM drive.

The Barracuda 180 — A Pioneer

The ST1181677 can be called a pioneer, since it is the first drive to break the 100 GB barrier. As I already mentioned, this could only be achieved by increasing the amount of platters. However, have you ever noticed that the first drives to set new records in capacity never run at maximum rotation speeds? The DiamondMax 80 is just one example of this.

To achieve record-breaking capacity with the Barracuda 180, Seagate was forced to go one step back with respect to rotation speed, thus ensuring top performance and reasonable drive temperatures.

At the same time, a lower rotation speed is not necessarily an attractive as a feature, but let’s be honest, any hard drive that doesn’t run reliably in the first place is not worth buying, and ultimately, the Barracuda’s conservative 7200 rpm should be proof of its reliability.

In any case, the Barracuda 180 is not meant to break speed records, but to provide as much storage capacity as possible.

As you will see in our benchmarks, Seagate did not even try to make a top performer out of this drive. Instead, they equipped the drive with a 16 MB buffer and concentrated on fast transfer speeds. For a drive that people will likely buy purely for storage reasons, the result is pretty respectable.

Test Setup

When I was setting up the drive, I encountered the problem that Windows 2000 was not able to format the 180 GB drive with FAT32. In this test situation, it was easier to create a 100% NTFS partition in Windows 2000 without any problems and that’s what we used for our benchmark setup. You can use the commands Fdisk and Format in Windows 98 to create a FAT32 partition that can be read by Windows 2000, but Fdisk will report it as being a maximum of 40 GB (total capacity modulo 64). You’ll have to enter ‘100%’ to create a full sized partition. Tom addressed the Fdisk issue in Special Problem — FDISK on Arrays Larger than 64 GB.

Hard disk manufacturers specify disk size in 1 GB = 1 Billion Bytes (10^9). The binary logic of operating systems instead defines 1 GB = 2^30 = ~1.073 * 10^9. This difference always results in a lower reported size. In the case of the Barracuda the 181.6 GB calculate into 168 GB formatted size.

Benchmarks

Data Transfer Diagram

The Barracuda 180 is not only a storage monster, but also a fast hard drive. Seagate uses horizontal mapping with this drive, so that it reaches maximum performance at the beginning of the medium, decreasing at the end of the medium.

Due to verification mechanisms, write performance clearly lags behind read performance. However, it is quite impressive to see that you can get > 30 MB/s read speed at the first 100 GB of this drive.

Data Transfer Performance

Reaching a maximum of exactly 45,000 KB/s, this 180 GB drive surpasses common 10,000 rpm drives. Unfortunately, this drive only runs at 7,200 rpm, which is the reason why the minimum data rate drops to ~ 18,000 KB/s at the end of the medium. Still you should keep the large capacity of this drive in mind, and also take the transfer diagram into account, where the average transfer rate stays at approximately 23 MB/s, even at the end of the medium. At this point, you will have already stored more than 140 GB of data!

Business Disk WinMarks

The Business Disk WinMark reveals that the Barracuda 180 is not a drive on which to install your operating system and run applications. All current IDE drives achieve between 8,000 and 10,000 Business Disk WinMarks.

Highend Disk WinMarks

At the Highend part of Ziff Davis’ WinBench 99 suite, the Barracuda is once again clearly outperformed by common high-performance drives. The Cheetah X15 (ST318451LC) is almost twice as fast here.

Access Time

Compared to these performance-drives, the Barracuda 180 does not stand a chance. Obviously the ‘slow’ rotation speed of 7,200 rpm has quite an impact on the rotational latency, resulting in longer access time. However, the result is still quite good if you compare it to current IDE drives. Our reference drive, the IBM DeskStar 75GXP (see Test Setup), is only slightly better, while most 7,200 IDE drives lag behind.

Drive Temperature

In terms of temperature, the Barracuda 180 with its 12 platters is not the ideal setup, as the additional platters help to accumulate heat. Therefore, the drive warmed up to 51 degrees Centigrade. This result is still acceptable, but shows the impact of the extra capacity on the thermal profile of the drive. The Fujitsu drive runs at 10,000 rpm, and yet it does not get hotter than the Barracuda.

Conclusion

At a price of $ 1,999, the Barracuda 180 is certainly not targeted at average home or office use. Putting four 45 GB drives into an IDE RAID array will provide the same storage capacity and more performance at a better price point. However, this new drive targets a different market, namely one that demands capacity. Even though the drive may look expensive and also its performance doesn’t seem particularly ground-breaking, I expect it to become successful simply because it offers more than twice the capacity than the largest drives available (73.4 GB). SCSI drives used to double their capacity with each new generation (9.1, 18.4, 36.7, 73.4 GB).

The next logical step would be 146 GB, which I expect to hit the market shortly as the remaining 73 GB drives at 1.5″ height are replaced by 1″ models. Therefore, Seagate’s new drive provides more capacity than people would have for this generation, so the Barracuda 180 will be a boon to expanding server farms. Putting the new Barracuda into vast drive arrays will allow expansion of capacity at existing performance levels without much effort.