Western Digital Caviar SE 2500JS HDD – SATA vs. SATA-II

Vikingod

Unless you have been living under a rock, you will be no stranger to the Serial ATA standard that has become the new medium for mass storage connection to the PC. Serial ATA standards have now started to produce in mass on motherboards, with upwards of 4 ports standard on Intel, ULi, SIS and nVidia Southbridge’s - not to mention the amount of additional controllers being added by motherboard makers, its not uncommon to see 6-8 SATA ports per motherboard.
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Read More / Source: TweakTown

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CDsDontBurn

at work we carry those as normal stock and sell them for cheaper than what newegg does ($105.99 USD)....no waiting for shipping, no $2.99 shipping

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nForcer

I'll be holding onto my Seagate's as long as they're topping WesternDigital's Raptors in every category.

CDsDontBurn

How's that?

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nForcer

My younger brother bought into the Raptor Hype and despite my ambitions to own one as well, I held off to see what a better company was going to produce - I didn't have to wait long. Seagate's Barracuda drives are of the best on the planet.

I wish I could post screenshots of my testing but the Raptors can't hold a candle to my 'cuda drives. Average transfer rate Read and Write, burst rate, damn near EVERY test I've thrown at them, the 'cuda drives not only beat, they embarass WesternDigital's Raptor drives. When my brother, again, bought into the SATA-II Raptor hype, I ran some more tests and wasn't suprised to see the difference between new-age drives and my older-gen 'cudas, but was shocked to see thier new drives were not even competiting with thier older drives let alone bragging about how much better they were!

The platters are still ATA in nature and if they were designed for high spindle speeds, don't you think EVERY manufacturer would be doing this? Raptor drives have a failure rate that rivals some 3rd-world countries death rates, and couldn't be further from the hype surrounding them.

They're decent drives, don't get me wrong, but the new drives WesternDigital is producing...have fallen far from the tree they came from.

CDsDontBurn

Ok, i have both a Raptor and two Seagate Barracuda's at home. When i get home from work, i will test this out using HDtach and post my results along w/screenies. That will be in about 3hrs. from now. Though, my Barracudas are in RAID 0, and my Raptor is single. W/the screenies you'll see how much better my single 36Gb raptor out performs my two seagates in RAID 0 .

The Raptors as of yet do not come in a SATA-II configuration. The 74Gb raptors are slightly faster than the 36Gb raptors, but the 74Gb raptors are still faster than the 36Gb (4.5ms vs. 5.2ms seek times).

And here at my work, for the amount of WD HDDs that we sell, i hardley see any of them come back as bad (maybe ~3% at most). And raptors from what i've seen are more reliable than their their

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CDsDontBurn

Ok, so i did run the benchmarks like i said i would (just a few hours longer than i had expected to run and post the results though), the results did surprise me some. I found that my RAID 0 array of two Seagate 80Gb 7200.7 HDDs, performed very similar to my single 36Gb raptor.

[color=red]Test 1:[/color]
Here is the single raptor tested in the 8Mb/sector test. As you can see from the graph, it has a steadily decreasing data transfer rate over a period of data transfer. The random access comes in at a higher than expected 8.8ms (lower is better), average read speed of 49.6Mb/sec. (higher is better), and a burst speed of 104.1Mb/sec. (higher is better).


In this demonstration i tested the raided seagates in the 8Mb/sector test. Here the seagates came in at 12.8ms seek time (lower is better), 86.3Mb/sec (higher is better) average read speed, and a burst rate of 111.2Mb (higher is better) burst rate


In this deomonstration, it is obviously clear that the raided seagates out perform the single raptor in read speed and burst speed, but the single raptor takes advantage of it's 10k spin rate thus giving you a lower seek time.

[color=red]Test 2:[/color]
Here is the 32Mb/sector test for the single raptor drive. as you can see, the test results are basically identical to the shoter 8Mb/sector test. Though the test did come back with a few performance drops.


This is the 32Mb/sector test for the raided seagate drives. Here we see similar results to the previous 8Mb/sector test on the raided seagates as well. Though, on this test, we see that the data transfer is continuous until the drives hit the 100Gb barrier when the data transfer rate drops significantly. The end result of this test shows that the seek time, and read time are basically identical to the 8Mb/sector test, however, the maximum burst speed has dropped from 111.2Mb/sec. to 108.7Mb/sec.


[color=red]Conclusion:[/color]
My conclusion thus far is that raptors have a much lower access speed than the raided seagates, but the seagates have better burst rates, and read speeds. However, you must also take into consideration in these tests performed that the drives were not equally matched up against each other. In order for equal comparison, the drives must NOT be in either single or a RAID 0 configuration for a more accurate performance evaluation between the two drives. RAID 0 is designed for performance, and these tests clearly shows this as the burst speeds and read speeds are clearly higher than the single raptor.

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nForcer

Nice pics, although I would have done an Alt-PrtScrn to only capture the HDTach window instead of a full screenshot.

I took a few of my own, just looking to get the time to do a decent side by side comparisson but I did notice, as did you, the access times are lower on the Raptors ONLY because the drive capacities are so low. How else can you explain why a 400gig drive has a similar access time as a 36gig drive? Yeah, the size of the platter makes a difference but if they're the same physical size, but thier density is much different and would give the Raptor the advantage because it isn't searching for a finite location at the far end of the disk - but suprisingly the 'cuda drives hold thier own. Just another reason I feel solid in my Seagate drives.

CDsDontBurn

meh, i still give kudos to my single raptor. i still feel it's faster. and like i said in my mini review that my seagates had an unfair advantage because they were in a RAID 0 configuration

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nForcer

Fine, I'll put up my own review. Just need a day or two to get it organized.

CDsDontBurn

lol. alrighty then . I'd re-do the review if i didn't lose all my information on my RAID 0 array w/a single HDD in testing. but i've about 135Gb of 160Gb used up ATM

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