Seagate Momentus 7200.4 thread

No tax when I get it off Newegg, for me New York

 

Has anybody compared the Momentus 7200.4 to 7200.3 or WD Scorpio Black?

 

Which WD scorpio black? There is several of those. I've compared it to my wd3200bekt, and it seems seagate is pretty much 15-20% faster in transferspeeds, but when it comes to IOPS and access times atleast my WD is superior to those tests i've seen of the 7200.4 500GB.

 

wd3200bekt, yes that's the drive I mean.

Does anybody know, then the 7200.4 becomes available in Germany??

 

I hope soon: Cyberport
but I think it will take until march

 

AFAIK it's released the 24th this month, so next week it should be available!

 

A lot of suppliers pushed back the delivery dates several times. So I don't believe it becomes available the next 2 weeks...

 

I can't find it anywhere -> ST9500420ASG
when its will be available? does anybody know?

 

I just installed my ST9500420AS a couple of days ago and I'm having problems trying to format/partition it. Apparently, it's a pretty common problem with Leopard. Every time I try to format it, It gives me an "input/output" error.

I've searched online and tried every workaround I found, i.e. booting from my Tiger install disk, using an external to boot then using Disk Utility, etc. If anyone has any suggestions/ solutions I'd greatly appreciate it.

 

Perhaps you may get more help if you post this to "Apple and Mac OS X" sub-forum...

Good luck,


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Decided to finally buy the ST9500420ASG. Apparently it will be 2 weeks before the drive is in Australia. Paid $227.70 for it, which seems pretty good for the G-force protection model. Can't wait! Thanks to everyone who posted their specs on here, helped to make the decision.

 

Hrm...I'm buying for speed as much as, or even more so, than capacity. Access time is important during boot and IOPS is important for installing s/w and other operations.

Care to comment on the subjective speed or general snappiness difference between the two drives in real life use?

 

I just partitioned mine under windows while the HDD being in external USB enclousure, then quick-formatted both partitions .. and that was it.

funny thing was that I couldn't make 2 equal size partitions .. Every time one was bigger than the other, eventhough I put half size. Then I tried with little big more on one partition, then little bit less .. and still couldn't make them equal .. lol

 

Are there any IOMeter Benchmarks of the 7200.4 out?? Or can someone post his results, please?

thx

 

I put this drive in my Unibody Macbook Pro and I think my Mac G sensor might not be working (I got the AS version, so not the ASG with the G sensor built into the hard drive) with this hard drive.

With the stock hard drive (250gb 5400rpm) whenever I would move the macbook around (even just from my lap to the table) I would hear the hard drive "lock" into a stop, as if it was holding for impact. It does not do that anymore. In fact, when I start to quickly move my macbook up and down, I can hear the hard drive going "mwha mwhah" as if it is not very happy I am doing so.

But it won't stop spinning. What do you guys think is going on?

 

Here's my 7200.4 and 7200.3 posted by another member.

 

vs WD3200BEKT

 

Would anyone here venture which of these will use least energy -longest battery life?
Hitachi 7k320 -320gb
wd3200bekt
7200.4 500gb

(currently own hitachi 7k200 100gb but seems to be getting smart errors as laptop was unfortunately dropped)

also how would you rank them performance wise ?

 

All of the drives mantioned by yourself are more power efficient than the 7K200 you have.
The Seagate 7200.3 is supposed to be the most power efficient 320gb 7200rpm drive.

Please note that the harddrive only represents a small portion of the actual power used by your system, so it will not drastically change battery life. The difference may only be like 5 minutes.

K-TRON

 

how about performance / noise ?

 

I personally have the 7K320's and they are very quiet. I do not buy anything but Hitachi, so I cannot tell you how loud the other drives are.

The seagate 7200.4 is the fastest 2.5" harddrive (500gb 7200rpm")

among the 320gb 7200rpm drives:
7K320 is the fastest at windows startup (quietest)
WD3200BEKT is the fastest in application loading (great balance of performance and power)
Seagate 7200.3 has the highest data bandwidth (most power efficient)

K-TRON

 

Can someone post a screenshot of HDDTune's health status page? I have this 7200.4 drive with G-shock and seems like its a bad drive from HDD tune's health status page.

 

Parijat,

Nothing wrong with that.. We have already discussed this issue in this thread before. Unlike other drives, Seagate reports positive "Raw Read Error Rate", "Seek Error Rate" and "Hardware ECC Recovered" values. Everybody has that issue so it is not a problem... It is perhaps due to the way Seagate implements them...


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Ahh...exactly what I was looking for, especially the access time. Thank you very much.

+rep

Thx again.

 

i don't get it, it says okay across teh board. what's the rpoblem.

 

Ok so i have been using the drive for 10 days and it is now dead ! I don't really know what happened, when i got back home my computer screen was black saying that there is no boot device available ! i tried to check the drive with the seatools in another computer but the drive fail the DST Short Test and the Short Generic ! i am going to contact the customer support tomorrow but there is no way i am paying 20 $ for the rush support i want it for free that the least they can do !

 

You guys know why every seagate comes up with seek error rate and spin retry count right?
Seagate tries to always one-up the competition in some way. They have effectively made a power efficient drive, but the way that they did it is not the best way. They are choking the motor for power. Instead of running the motor at full power all of the time, the are running the motor at high impulses so that it uses less power. It is still effectively the same rpm, but what is happening is the drive cant spool up as fast causing the drive to read that it couldnt spin up properly so it restarted.

Good luck Jay-B, I hope you get your drive replaced. Seagate has been really screwing up lately.

K-TRON

 

There is nothing wrong with the Spin Retry Count. It is always 0 in all the drives reviewed here. The non-zero ones are:

1- Raw Read Error Rate
2- Seek Error Rate
3- Hardware ECC Recovered


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Whoa...you mean like some form of PWM?

Any links?

/me isn't too thrilled with this

 

I’m struggling with myself, if I should wait for Momentus 7200.4 to use it in Raid0 for the highest data bandwidth or if I should buy 2 WD3200BEKT for the best IO-Performance but lower capacity (640 GB vs 1 TB) and lower bandwidth!?

 

I'm in the same boat, too, but have been looking at SSDs, as well. Though my lappy only is single disk capable, not RAID able like yours.

I'm thinking I might just get the W320BEKT currently $79 USD with no tax and free shipping from the Egg, and be done with it.

Or at least done with it for a relatively inexpensive price, until I feel confident enough to go SSD.

 

No problem Thank you.

Highest sequential read is 71.1MB/s that i've gotten in a benchmark for this drive, so 15.1ms + 71MB/s is very decent Btw, the IOPS & random access tests of my WD is better than the test from seagates random access test posted in this thread earlier.

 

Yes, I've noticed that, and frankly, I'm disappointed. I'm looking to buy speed primarily, rather than capacity. I'm constantly torrenting, adding and uninstalling apps, OSs (I dual and tri-boot), etc., and then reboot often. STRs aren't as important to me as fast seek and access.

I'm coming primarily from a desktop world, and these are pretty poor access times, IMHO. I'd seriously go SSD if only they weren't in such a state of flux, ATM.

I might just get the WD 320 BEKT as an inexpensive "hold-over" until SSDs mature w/i the next year hopefully.

Thx again.

 

I understand you, i thought the same way before i bought my laptop + the harddrive, i was looking at desktop performance and this harddrive definately fits into that.

 

OK, guys -

For the reasons in my post #784 I just ordered the NewEgg Scorpio Black 320 deal that Michel.K and I just duscussed.

I'm honestly more interested in transitioning to SSDs for speed, and felt the Scorpio would be a quick, inexpensive, tried-n-true proven way to get enough performance to hold me at bay 'till I'm more SSD confident at my price point. I know I'm somewhat buying a previous gen technology tho, but am hoping to replace it with an SSD before too long, anyway,

I'll stay subscribed and follow the Momentus. I'm particuliarly interested in seeing what performance we will see when WD (et al) respond to Seagate's challenge.

 

I think you will be satisfied actually. This is my last mechanical hdd (hopefully), after i'm done with this drive i'll go for SSD, though the speed on this hdd is enough, but who doesn't want more speed, and i can't find a faster mechanical hdd anyways. I've had my drive powered for 3373hours as we speak, so that's very much And it's been working nicely. That's like a year of consumption for an average user (8-10 hours per day).

 

Yes, agreed. As at least several of us enthusiast speed freaks have meantioned earlier in this thread, "This will be my last mechanical HDD device, hopefully".

I'd like to place strong emphasis the word * hopefully*!

 

3xP053r_, that post was amazing. I like how to analysis HD Tune graph in detail.

 

We where not looking for sequential read/write transferspeeds here, but accestime and IOPS. And yes i have my drive as a systemdrive. And yes i know about the partitioning, i've recommneded alot of people on this forum on how to do it and why it is faster.

Still the WD3200BEKT shows slightly faster and better IOPS, those small differences is still in favour for the WD, i've reran my RA-test several times and i get the same "scores" all the time, so i bet you'll get the same with the seagate. Those 1ms faster access times can do much for the overall performance.

The seagate will only and is faster on transferspeeds, i haven't said it's slower there, as it's not. And ofcourse the 500GB will have upto and a little bit over 100MB/s in the beginning as it has 250GB platters vs the WD that has 160GB platters.


The WD3200BEKT is superior when it comes to IOPS, like in a server-environment, it's already proven by the larger benchmark sites like tomshardware.

What regards the acces times in HD tune under "benchmark" AFAIK hd tune has been very buggy when it comes to measuring this correctly as it sometimes stops at 70% or 50% for some reason, i've had that issue before, so maybe it has something to do with that, that it will not show up correctly, as it is the same version that has that bug for some people.

Here are some form HD Tach, though you cannot see a graph for access time but it benchmarks it!




Taken at different times.

 

Firstly: please don't uselessly quote whole posts (and with pictures!).

You wrote "i can't find a faster mechanical hdd", which is not true if you consider just one aspect of what makes it fast.

Also pretty big part of my post actually was about access time and IOPS, have you read it?

Am I looking at different pictures or what? Let's recapitulate:

Block size | IOPS - WD | IOPS - Seagate
512 B | 64 | 60
4 kB | 61 | 62
64 kB | 60 | 58
1 MB | 31 | 33
Random | 42 | 41

Yes, it is slightly faster at 3 out of 5 block sizes. At 2 it is slower. But as I said, the difference of a pair of IOPS is nothing (see next answer to next quote).

Also are you simply adding the differences up? But they are weighted by different block sizes! The correct comparison is:

WD: 512*64 + 4*1024*61 + 64*1024*60 + 1024*1024*31 + 42*rnd
Seagate: 512*60 + 4*1024*62 + 64*1024*58 + 1024*1024*33 + 41*rnd

Since I don't know what "random" is, I just use an average of other block sizes: 279680.

So results are:

WD: 48467200
Seagate: 50155648

Even if the "random" means truly random (any value between 512 B and 1 MB), then average will be circa 512 kB and results would be:

WD: 58740736
Seagate: 60184576

I just don't see the WD winning or being superior in terms of IOPS here, sorry...

Do you mean, that you get absolutely precise same IOPS to the last single unit every time? That's simply not possible, because:

a) you are running a multitasking system,

b) by being a "random" test (even worse, it's pseudorandom!), you WILL get variations as in any random event.

Hm, you are saying, that WD Black is superior and next to it you say, that the difference which makes it allegedly superior means nothing?

Please, look again at the first two pictures and explain to me, where that superiority comes from. I am just not getting it at all...

Also benchmark sites - please post a link. I wasn't able to locate even a 7200.4 review on a tomshardware. So how they was able to prove, that WD Black is superior to a drive, that wasn't out yet when they was testing it? If you are refering to 320 GB-category benchmarks, than yes, it should be superior to other 320 GB drives (and 7200.3), but that doesn't prove anything in comparison to newer generation of 7200.4. And advicing that WD Black is faster than 7200.4 because of benchmarks made when 7200.4 didn't exists is like... convincing somebody who owns a docking station with drive bay, that such docking station doesn't exist.


Finally, you are right, when you say that WD Black is superior in IOPS. You are just not saying to what it is superior. To other 320 GB drives? Very probably yes. To 7200.4 500 GB? Absolutely NOT!

 

From my experience, HD Tach measures better time than HD Tune, so your HD Tach with 15.7 - 15.8 ms just shows that HD Tune gone wrong with the downward trend of the access time graph and subsequent result of 15.1 ms.

But OK, if not using the same actual version of HD Tune, let's compare HD Tach results then, here they are for 7200.4:



Just to compare side by side, your results from WD Black again (I took the one with better access time):

 

Are you telling me how to act on this forum where yourself is new? Funny.
Pictures or not, if they're seen more than once, doesn't matter for bandwidth, so i don't see the bother, just a little more scrolling to do.

And btw, i quote whole posts because it's my intention to do so in order if you or someone else edits the post afterwards, then i have the whole original post in my quote. Okay?


I have read your post, yes. Still, at the time i bought my hdd, there wasn't any faster hdd available, if you see what i said, it's been powered for 3300hrs+, do the math and you'll see how long time ago that was.
Even how much you're talking about IOPS and access times, doesn't mean it's gonna change the fact on what we're seeing on the screenshots.

Why i say the seagate is slower is that the average access time is above 16ms and for the WD it's always under 16ms. And for the RA-test the WD still has lower access times which means it's generally faster.
You know why velociraptor for example is the fastest among the mechanical hdds out there? Hint: It's not because of transferspeeds..

Your comparision when adding them all up, you can't just add them all togheter like that, you have to look at them each, 3 of 5 WD is better. So, i do not know how you could change the fact that is listed on those screens. Where seagate is only better on two of those 5 ra/iops. How can you make 2 of 5 wins to be a total win is a mystery for me.

Because if you add them all togheter like you've done is very incorrect and why do you multiply 1024 several times? Even if you did change it , it wouldn't be correct. Or would it? Could you please explain why if so?

Anyhow, why would we not count the lowest 512 B ra-test in, it's these things as SSD's is very very bad at and make windows stutter. So why would they be useless to look at here? Are you just trying to make things up here? I'm just plain comparing the bencharmarks i've seen here with my hard drive nothing else. If it's better IRL or not, i cannot say, but it seems so here in my eyes atleast So why would i say something else when there is nothing showing better benchmarks in those tests with that particular drive. Hehe.

And ofcourse i don't get the same exact values all the time, but i thought you'd understand that. There is always gonna be a small difference from time to time, but in the majority of tests is showing the same, that's what i meant.

I have no idea what allegadally means, i'm not a native english speaker, sorry. So i have no idea what you're meaning and i don't actually care I'm not bloody serious about this, i'm just glad to help people out and not start a retarded argument over the internet.




And yes, i've meant vs other 320GB hard drives, but mostly against this 7200.4 hard drive, as it doesn't score higher or atleast no one has proven it could score higher than the picutre i've compared to, if someone does get better benchmark results, then it's another thing, i'm not really a fan of WD since i've bought Seagate hard drives since -99, i only switched over to WD atm because it was actually faster at what i was looking for. Otherwise Seagate is always my number #1 choice if it's truly proven to be best. So i'm not trying to be a fanboy here


Just relax and take it easy man. This is not a good way for you to start out on (for you) a new forum.

 

My HD Tune for access times has always been the other way. So what your experience is, may not be an actual fact.
I was just showing you my hd tach screens in order to explain to you that HD Tach may be buggy when it comes to measuring access times, if you didn't see that. Then i don't mean when it shows the actual values, but i mean when it places all those dots on the benchmark test in HD tune.


15.6ms for the seagate seems awesome anyhow! But why won't it ever show lower than 16ms for anyone else? Have you optimized your hard drive in any way?

 

Sorry for that, but I got some academic work and I just don't have time to reply to all of this again and again... So this is my last post related to this mini-war.

Just some quick notes without the exhausting playing with quotes to be highlighted:

"Are you telling me how to act on this forum where yourself is new? Funny."

I am not so new here, I was here since 2006 (lost previous login), but I never posted here much. Also being new on one forum doesn't mean being new on the Internet. Whole-quoting is considered bad practice almost everywhere where I was registered. Even RFC 1855 (netiquette) mentions quoting (only marginally however). When you consider having a copy for whatever anybody can do to you by editing his post (I don't see many options), at the cost of making reading this site harder for every other and presenting yourself that way, it's your choice.

---

"Even how much you're talking about IOPS and access times, doesn't mean it's gonna change the fact on what we're seeing on the screenshots."

And that's it. I just don't see it on screenshots either. If you are reffering to the "3 over 2 wins" things, then I am speechless...

---

"Why i say the seagate is slower is that the average access time is above 16ms and for the WD it's always under 16ms."

And what am i saying is that with bigger drive, you will be doing full stroke seeks less and with good partitioning and/or defragmenting, you will be most commonly doing only a fraction of full seek span.

---

"Because if you add them all togheter like you've done is very incorrect and why do you multiply 1024 several times? Even if you did change it , it wouldn't be correct. Or would it? Could you please explain why if so? "

Because one kilobyte is 1024 bytes? And one megabyte is 1024 kilobytes? And it is very correct if you are looking at overall performance. Just this example - give 1$, 10$ and 100$ to two people to invest it. First would invest it with interests 10%, 10%, 2% (1, 10 and 100 dollars in that order). Second would invest it at 2%, 2%, 10% (again 1, 10, 100 accordingly). While firsts "wins" in two investments and the second wins only in one investment, first's yield is 3.1$ and second will get 10.22$. By your method of simply looking at "number of wins", the first one is the winner, but in reality the second gets a lot more. This is the same principle. But again, I repeat for a hundreth time now - 2 IOPS is a statistical error between two measurements. We should have done these measurements a couple of times on single-program operating system booted off another drive with both drives on perfectly same system and average the results for each drive. If you have such time, software and both drives physically - just start. Then you can say that those 2 IOPS are in favor of WD or Seagate.

---

"Anyhow, why would we not count the lowest 512 B ra-test in, it's these things as SSD's is very very bad at and make windows stutter. So why would they be useless to look at here? Are you just trying to make things up here?"

First: because most common OS use default cluster size of 4 kB (at least Windows, but Linux and Mac probably have some similar sizes too). That means that everything on the drive is being done in 4 kB blocks - 8 sectors of 512 B. Unless you are using a lot of files smaller than 4 kB (like browser's cache, but that's what ramdisks are for!), performance for 512 B blocks means nothing to you. No fragment of a file can be smaller than 4 kB (with some end padding for the size to be 4 kB multiple) so even if you have absolutely brutally fragmented drive, you will be facing the performance as seen in 4 kB row of the benchmark, not 512 B row.

Second: true that SSDs are bad at 512 B random read, the same way as harddrives are. But this doesn't create the stuttering, the stuttering is caused by poor microcontroller (the one beginning with "JMi----") with only 16 kB of cache. This makes cheaper SSDs stutter when you (or your OS) do more things at once - the microcontroller becomes overloaded. For example - Intel SSD doesn't have any amazing values for 512 B random. But it has good microcontroller and 1024-times more cache - 16 MB if I remember correctly. And so it doesn't stutter (there are other things like full drive, wear leveling and so on, but that's another SSD chapter).

---

"What regards the acces times in HD tune under "benchmark" AFAIK hd tune has been very buggy"

"I was just showing you my hd tach screens in order to explain to you that HD Tach may be buggy"

Pick just one.

---

"But why won't it ever show lower than 16ms for anyone else?"

Because you are comparing HD Tune with HD Tach and just like I said (and you don't believe), HD Tach measures differently than HD Tune. I scanned this topic quickly and didn't find any HD Tach results (but maybe I missed them). Try to get any HD Tach results on Momentuses and you'll see it.

And it's not modded, Photoshopped, faked or anything else. Two generations older Seagate (7200.2) even scores 14.4 ms in HD Tach and 5400.4 scores 15.4 ms. But of course, "it's not facts".

(Plus maybe an AAM turned off by hddscan, but other programs say AAM isn't even supported.)


"This is not a good way for you to start out on (for you) a new forum."

Don't treat anybody who doesn't have time to do a 6.7 posts saying "you choosed right to buy that drive" per day as a newbie on the Internet.

If you are taking it as a "karma", I would say that contradicting some inaccurate allegations is far better than for example whole-quoting.

And technically: you registered on Sept. 2008. With my lost account I was here in summer 2006, so who's new...

----------

PS: I won't respond anymore, I just don't have time to explain basic principles like binary prefixes, statistical error, weighted average or SSD stuttering. Take it as your win or whatever...

 

Everyone has their own way of responding, thanks for not respecting that.
This is my, what can it be, 30th forum i'm on?
And it's been okay to do it in every other forum, without people whining because they know the only things is, that you get to scroll a little bit more, nothing else. I've never ever on my 10 years on the internet forums had gotten a ban or a warning of any kind. It's really nothing to complain about.

But i'll respect your way here if it makes you feel any better

Well you are, aren't you? This is why i see why one drive is faster than another, but only in that aspect, nothing else. It's not a big win, never said that, but it's still a "win". Even if the seagate may actually turn out faster than that. Just waiting for even better scores to show up.

And if you add those sides to the smaller drive, will it make the fraction of a full seek span even smaller etc?

Firstly:
I wasn't doing any hardcore compairing here, i was just agreeing with strat that it seems to be faster.

And secondly, if you're gonna add them all up, use the correct values and not 1024 several times. And thirdly, if you're gonna use the "add all up" sum, you have to add all the IOPS alone togheter and not the size, the size of the IOPS doesn't matter as the IOPS alone will show you how many things the drive can do at once, which is more important, if you wanna be a hardcore you can compare which transfersizes did won or not.

If we add up how many IOPS the WD can handle

64 - 60 = + 4 for WD (total)
61 - 62 = +3 for WD (total)
60 - 58 = +5 for WD (total)
31 - 33 = +3 for WD (total)
42 - 41 = +4 for WD (total)

So what we have here in clean IOPS are 4 more IOPS for WD. Please tell me how this isn't relevant here when doing a non-hardcore analysis? And it's not 2. How's your math?

Changing cluster size only hasn't been approved to fix that problem either. How it's fragmented or not, i wouldn't know.

Yeah, but it's most because of the bad random write and very small writes, the jmicron controller can't handle those like it should.
So these small sizes are good to see a value on too, even if they are hardly used. That's what i meant to say.

You didn't get what i was saying i guess..

Yeah, but still why aren't any benchmarks showing lower than 16ms from hd tune? Forget everything that's named HD tach. I ain't comparing with hd tach. I just don't think you got what i said.

Say what? It was his own will that he said it looked faster, and it does look faster, i was just agreeing with him on that, sorry that i agreed?

And if you don't have time for 6.7 posts, my tip is: don't argue or discuss or even start a discussion like this.

I don't believe in karma, i believe in myself.
So whole-quoting is inaccurate? For who? - You?
The quotation-system is there to be used - use it as you want and you shall be happy.


I registered on another hardware forum back in 2001, and i'm a somewhat guru over there. If it's there you wanna go?

And if you've been registered earlier, you should know that starting a "war" as you say it, is not a good way to start out with a new user, no one else knows who you are, so therefor you look like a new user that's never been here. Simple logic in my mind.
What was your old user that you used?

And i'm just saying that we don't need to be hostile, just be glad, help each other and if you have to say against anyone, do it a t the same level and please don't try to take my comparision up like i did a hardcore comparision, because i didn't.

Okey, your own choice, but i won't either and the main cause of that is that this "war" that you created is just becoming irrational and silly.

 

Hello guys,
I'm a new one in this forum, but I think this discussion goes more and more to offtopic-level. If you have something to clarify with each other, please use PMs, because nobody is interessted in this silly "war".

 

I've got to say. I enjoyed that debate between Michel.K and 3xP053r_. I pretty much have no idea what half the technical jargon meant, but it made me chuckle haha. Thanks guys!

 

This debate between Michel.K and 3xP053r_ is funny, because they're both constantly misunderstanding each other.

Comes down to this:
7200.4 has better read/write speeds than the Scorpio Black 320GB, which makes sense.
7200.4 and Scorpio Black 320GB have similar IOPS, which also makes sense.

 

7200.4 also has 56% more capacity than the Scorpio Black. The 7200.4 is also faster than all 500GB 5400 RPM HDDs.

 

But 3xP053r_ made an interesting point. The seagate has worse average access times but better average transfer rates than the WDC.

But if we create (as everyone does) a system partition which contains the OS and the programs with the 160GB 3xP053r_ suggested, then the whole thing looks completely different. Because the Seagate has a much higher capacity the partition allocates only the first 32%; on the WDC, with less capacity, it allocates the first 50%.

Now if we take a look at these sections (highlighted by 3xP053r_) then we see, that the
Seagate is not only faster: Seagate: 104MB/s-80MB/s vs. WDC: 80MB/s-70MB/s) the
Seagate also has faster access times: Seagate: 4ms-18ms vs. WDC: 4ms-21/26ms

Booting from the Seagate drive will be faster than booting from the WDC drive. So the Seagate drive is the faster drive!