New Seagate 5400.6 500GB hard drive & HD Tune results

Here are the results of a freshly installed unformatted Seagate 5400.6 (ST9500325AS):

First Test
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HD Tune: ST9500325AS Benchmark

Transfer Rate Minimum : 38.7 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Maximum : 80.1 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Average : 63.3 MB/sec
Access Time : 19.5 ms
Burst Rate : 56.4 MB/sec
CPU Usage : 10.7%

Second Test
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HD Tune: ST9500325AS Benchmark

Transfer Rate Minimum : 38.7 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Maximum : 80.1 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Average : 63.3 MB/sec
Access Time : 19.0 ms
Burst Rate : 51.7 MB/sec
CPU Usage : 8.3%



Test machine was a Gateway P-7811FX factory settings.

 

Thanks for the first ever benchies!

Nice performing drive. Just a shame about access times. I guess they're pretty good on power though.

 

Once I get the second drive and get RAID 0 set up I'll repost with screen shots.

 

i'm looking forward to seeing the raid results. it seems a bit slower than the WD 500gb drive if i'm not mistaken. well, more results will tell.

 

Seems slow for SATA interface, I would have expected bursts up to SATA I speeds.

Now if someone would throw in SAS drives, we could get burst of 600MB/s, depending on the card.

 

will this fit into my xps M1330 I am thinking of ordering one please help. Also how do i get ubuntu linux to play dvd movies on my xps m1330
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148371

 

Yes its a notebook drive

 

If you care about speed get the WD5000BEVT. It has faster acces times.

 

yes but the wd warranty is shorter. is that speed difference reall7y worth it.

 

Do OEM stuff has warranty!!!

 

To me it would be.

 

Personally, I find that if you have harddrive problems, they either happen within the first few months of owning the drive, the first few minutes of owning the drive, or after like 6 years of operating.
WD has given me issues in the past about 4 years ago when I bought a load of 40 drives, and 3 worked. But I did pick up a 500gb desktop drive by them and it seems pretty solid, I hope.
Lots of people praise the WD drives, so its really brand preference.

I would wait until the Hitachi 5k500B hits the market, that will introduce more competition, and maybe lower prices.
Also, the past few months Zipzoomfly has had insane offers on harddrives, like $30 or more dollar rebates, so getting that fast drive is going to be much easier on the wallet.

If you go for a Hitachi drive, dont buy the 5k500. It is 12.5mm thick. The 5k500.B is a standard 9.5mm thick.

K-TRON

 

based on that chinese HD tune graph ?

 

post graph

 

the chinese arent trustworthy?

 

Based on 2 HDTune results showing acces times around 19ms.

It continues the trend set by 5400.5: relatively slow acces times, optimized for efficiency not speed. It will be quiet and cool though.

WD5000BEVT is continuing the thread set by WD3200BEVT. That was the fastest 5400rpm drive before.

And HDTune isn't even showing the IOPS. If it would, I expect a bigger difference between the two.

 

... I have alot of trouble with Hitachi drives... 3 of the 5 I own have failed...
0/1 WD failed
0/1 Seagate
5/8 Hitachi(all OEM)
1/1 samsung... yah I kill a lot hard drives...

 

To continue what Yuio posted, but for my experience:

0/7 DIGITAL RLL/MFM drives (All made in Germany and still running today)
1/1 Western Digital RLL/MFM drive (Had brand new in box for 16 years, and on first use it burned out within 3 minutes)
0/3 Micropolis RLL/MFM drives (All made in Greece and still working today)

now normal desktop drives:
9/13 Seagate
5/~40 Maxtor (all of which died were between 160 and 500Gb)
37/40 Western Digital (I must have bought a bad batch)
0/6 Hitachi
0/6 Samsung drives
0/4 Quantum Bigfoot drives (5.25")
3/7 Quantum Fireball drives
2/2 Conner drives

laptop drives:
0/0 Western Digital
0/1 Seagate
1/13 Hitachi (One I received dead in a broken laptop I bought)
0/1 Samsung

This data was collected from the last 4 years of operating computers. Many of the desktop drives were on the older side almost all less than or equal to 40Gb.

K-TRON

 

I had one of those. It burned out 5 minutes after I installed a new p4 in my PC. Left me quite pissed...

 

Eh? Bad batch? I should say so! What's that all about?

 

I bought 40 identical WD 40gb drives about 6 years ago for a rackmount I was working on.
When the drives came to my house I believe 16 of them didnt work straight out of the box. another 9 of them failed with errors when installing windows, and found that their were errors all over the drive. After weeding out the bad ones another 12 of them lasted about a week, and than they one by one crapped out. In the end I was left with 3 drives which ran for about 6 months. I rma'ed the other drives and it was practically the same thing over again, so after that I contacted western digital and I received my money back for their terrible drives.
At that point I switched to Hitachi, and I never had a problem with any of their drives: desktar, ultrastar, travelstar. I only have one WD now, and that will be replaced pretty soon by a Hitachi.

K-TRON

 

Blimey....

 

Here is the Raid 0 benchmarks for 2x Seagate 5400.6 500GB HDD's using HD Tune.

HD Tune: Intel Raid 0 Volume Benchmark

Transfer Rate Minimum : 29.4 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Maximum : 125.6 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Average : 98.9 MB/sec
Access Time : 20.9 ms
Burst Rate : 51.1 MB/sec
CPU Usage : 13.4%


Having issues with posting screenshots but here is the basics. Test system was Gateway 7811FX using clean install of Vista x64.

 

Thanks for the results.

I think you have fallen foul of one of the anti-spam measures. Participate here for a bit longer and you should be able to post links and images.

John

 

i thought the datasheet stated 1175mb/s, its max should be around that value? seems that the actual result didnt get that high.

 

That's 1175M b/s, not M B/s. (1Mb/s = 0.125MB/s) And its theoretical, not real-world.

 

thanks for the specs - been really torn up between this and the WD caviar and trying to find some benchmarks for these for ages. Here's a summary of the salient features just fyi:

the WD5000BEVT 500gb stats from here:
Minimum: 38.9 38.5
Max: 79.5 77.8
Average: 61.6 60.8
Access time: 16.8
Burst 98.4 90.8
Cpu: 17.0 18.7 <-- probably meaningless as I don't know what the cpu (edit: used in benchmark) is

So it looks like the WD does perform better.

WD warranty is 3 year from here. Seagates is 5 year I guess? I couldn't find something that stated this on the seagate website?

Power consumption based on data sheets for read+write/idle/standby/sleep:
WD: 2.50 / 0.85 / 0.25 / 0.10
Seagate: 2.6-2.85 / 0.81 / 0.22 /

Of course these are off the data sheet, so how close they are to real world performance who knows (but then I don't know if anybody really benches this stuff for laptop drives?)

Given that the WD scorpio is actually cheaper where I live (aus) I guess I'll be going with that.

 

Seagate does not carry a 5 year warranty anymore, they only carry a 3 year warranty now. This has upset many customers, and probably caused more revenue for Hitachi and Western Digital.

CPU stands for central processing unit. It is another word for processor. It is basically the heart behind everything your laptop does.

The WD5000BEVT generates higher IOPS than the seagate does, and it has a faster access time, making the WD the faster of the 500GB 5400rpm drives.

What laptop do you have?
Alot of the older laptops only use PATA based harddrives. The new ones mainly use SATA

K-TRON

 

ahh okay thanks for the heads up re warranty. Where is this stated on the seagate page? It really seems a pain to navigate when you want to find out for a PROSPECTIVE purchase as opposed to one you already have.

Anyway, really makes the choice a no brainer then (Hopefully I won't be crying - too much - when the 5k500B's come out )

thanks for the CPU explanation, that was a typo by me and I actually meant meant I don't know what cpu he used for the benchmark hehe

i've got a t61p. It currently has a 7200rpm 160gb hitachi sata.

 

The Hitachi 5K500.B's are available but they are very hard to come by. If you email Hitachi they can give you an estimated ship date. They will let you buy the drives direct from Hitachi, but I believe they have a 50 minimum purchase.

I have not seen any benchmarks for the 5K500.B, but I would assume it will be very similar to the WD5000BEVT.


K-TRON

 

Not sure if anyone has noticed, but what is up with the burst speed, that doesn't seem right, its actually below the max transfer speed, is the sata controller to blame or the drive?

 

I prefer HDTach's version of the burst speed. For some reason HD Tune get's it low with this HDD.

What most benchmarks don't reveal is that while the Seagate 5400.6 500GB is slightly ahead of the WD5000BEVT on read performance, the WD has a clear margin on write speed. See the attached results for SiSoftware Sandra benchmarks.

John