Real Gentlemen: Performance IDE Hard Drives — THG.RU

Real Gentlemen: Performance IDE Hard Drives

Three new performance drives challenge the establishment: Seagate’s Barracuda ATA IV (80 GB) and Western Digital’s WD600BB as well as 800BB (60 and 80 GB). They are characterized by a rotation speed of 7,200 rpm, resulting in high data transfer rates and quick access times. While former drives usually were hot and loud, the latest generation is surprisingly quiet — without any impact on performance.

In contrast to standard desktop drives, which run at 5,400 rpm, performance drives are expected to be fast. Previously, speed was attained at the expense of critically high temperatures. Now, with their fourth or fifth generation of 7,200 rpm drives, manufacturers have been able to reduce the amount of heat generated by these fast drives. Noise levels have also been lowered quite a bit, and although all companies offer acoustic management (the access speed can be altered via software in order to reduce noise emissions), only few software utilities are officially available to make use of it.

We have not been talking much about acoustic management for hard drives. In any case, there are components in your computer that can generate much more noise than a hard drive — powerful CPU and GPU fans as well as fast CD drives are usually much louder. In my opinion, acoustic management is pretty useless if we’ve already got fans running at 4,000+ rpm to keep today’s CPUs alive. As you will see in the benchmarks, the new hard drives give you no reason at all to make an issue about noise level — all of them run very quietly.

Seagate Barracuda ATA IV, ST380021A

Voilб, here it is: The latest Seagate Barracuda ATA, fourth generation.

Many people have been waiting for the fourth generation Barracuda IDE drive, called Barracuda ATA IV. The first Barracuda ATA was a kind of pioneer because it was one of the first models to run at 7,200 rpm (the other model was IBM’s DTTA drive). Now, the Barracuda ATA IV is much faster and behaves like a gentleman: It is modest and actually one of the quietest hard drives we have tested.

In terms of performance, other drives (like the good old DTLA 307030 or the DiamondMax Plus 60) may achieve higher maximum transfer rates. But usually, the data transfer rate almost collapses if you read or write data at the end of the medium. However, that doesn’t happen with the Barracuda ATA IV, which is able to sustain remarkable 23 MB/s throughout the entire medium. This factor could be more important than the maximum performance if you want to do audio or video editing.

The bottom surface of the Barracuda ATA IV is shielded in an exemplary manner by an aluminum plate. This protects the PCB from damage during installation or transport.

You have probably already noticed the insulating material (blue). On the one hand, it ensures that the ICs on the PCB do not come into contact with the metal cover. On the other hand, it also probably helps to reduce the noise generated, with the result that the drive is very silent, even during access.

For more information about this drive, please go to the Seagate website.

Western Digital 600BB

The WD600BB

Western Digital has five models in the BB series: 20, 30, 40, 60 and 80 GB (incidentally, WD recently announced a 100 GB drive on their website, but so far there’s been no information as to its availability — stay tuned!). All of them have quick access times, decent data transfer performance, and above-average HighEnd Disk WinMark scores. Here we look more closely at the WD 600BB (60GB).

This picture shows the top side of the 600BB: On the sticker you can see the jumper settings that apply to the jumper block at the bottom of the image.

For more information about this drive, please go to the Western Digital website.

Western Digital 800BB

The WD800BB will not remain the flagship for much longer: A new 100 GB drive is coming soon.

The WD800BB is a very affordable drive — it can already be had starting at $ 190. Taking its low price into account, the performance of this drive is quite good. It’s temperature is only slightly higher than the 600BB, and surprisingly, both its surface temperature and noise level are even lower than the WD400BB.

Just like with the WD600BB: The jumper settings are printed on the label. Without it, you could not possibly distinguish the WD drives from each other.

For more information about this drive, please go to the Western Digital website.

Test Setup

Benchmarks

The following benchmark charts will include the test results for the three new drives plus some formerly tested drives for reference. In addition, I put the three budget drives into the charts as well — just to give you a better overview on the performance difference between 5,400 and 7,200 rpm drives — they won’t be mentioned for comparison reasons.

Data Transfer Diagrams: Performance Drives

Seagate Barracuda ATA IV ST380021A

The new Barracuda ATA IV is a good performer. Though it fails to reach constant data transfer speeds of > 35 MB/s, it is able to provide at least 23 MB/s over the whole medium — this is quite a fast result. Write performance could be faster, but you can be sure that it is always constant.

Western Digital WD600BB

As long as you don’t fill more than 50% of this drive’s capacity, you will get a data transfer rate of at least 30 MB/s. In the second half of the medium, the performance drops to approximately 19 MB/s.

Western Digital WD800BB

The current Western Digital flagship provides almost 35 MB/s in the first third of the medium. Going further, the data transfer performance will decrease to 22 MB/s.

Data Transfer Performance

The new performance drives score well (35-37 MB/s), but cannot beat the three drives at the top. Please also take a look at the minimum transfer rate. This number is important for all kinds of streaming applications (audio or video editing). Currently, Seagate’s Barracuda ATA IV is the fastest drive in this respect, not dropping below 23 MB/s.

Disk Access Time

Three drives are at the very top: The DiamondMax Plus 60, Fujitsu’s MPG3204AH and the IBM DeskStar 75GXP. Our newcomers take the positions 3 to 6.

Application Performance

In this particular benchmark, the new Seagate Barracuda ATA IV is not able to get a top ranking. Both new Western Digital drives score more than 9000 Business WinMark points.

Here we can see that real progress has been made: All the three performance drives are clearly faster for high-end applications than all other drives. The Barracuda ATA IV from Seagate establishes a new record: 23,100 points.

Disk Temperature

In terms of temperature, the performance drives got quite hot this time. Please consider the lab temperature of 26°C instead of 21-23°C that we normally have. Hence it’s safe to discount 2 or 3 degrees from the test result. Anyhow, the new drives are still hot ones, and it’s likely part of the trade-off in having quieter drives.

Disk Noise Level

When we first turned the system on with Seagate’s Barracuda ATA IV, we were a little but suspicious. Was the drive running? It was, and even though it runs at 7,200 rpm, it is almost as silent as a 5,400 drive!

The new Western Digital drives (600BB and 800BB) are very modest too. The drives we tested before produce clearly more idle noise.

Conclusion

The clear winner of this drive review is Seagate’s Barracuda ATA IV. It is a fast hard drive with excellent performance — though it does not reach the maximum data transfer speed of other drives, it is able to sustain high rates throughout the whole medium. In addition, it is the quietest of all 7,200 rpm drives right now.

Western Digital once again shows their ability to build timely hard drives that run both fast and quiet.

What’s Next: UltraATA/133 On The Way

On July 31, Maxtor released the specifications for this accelerated interface. This information was published only some days after Intel’s announcement to wait for the integration of Serial ATA into their chipsets til 2003. Currently, VIA, SiS, Adaptec and Promise already agreed to Maxtor’s latest thrust and are ready to implement it into their next generation controllers. Everybody expected Serial ATA to become the next hard drive interface standard. Now, Maxtor’s UltraATA/133 standard could become the perfect transitional solution, as first chipsets are expected to hit the market early 2002 already.

While we will not get rid of the flat cables until arrival of Serial ATA, UltraATA/133 is still downwards-compatible to UltraATA/100, UltraATA/66, UltraDMA/33 and all PIO modes. You can also keep using your 80-pin IDE cables.