Seagate Barracuda 200  Gbytes

Evgenie Rudometov,

Victor Rudometov

http://www.rudometov.com

Company Seagate has presented recently the first-ever hard disk drive with a bit density of 100 Gbytes on a 3,5-inch slice. The arrangement possesses information capacity of 200 Gbytes and interface PATA.

The hard disk drives named simply as hard disks or hard disks, are one of the major computer accessories. They are intended for writing, reading and storage of great volumes of the information.

Each of the given arrangements consists of four basic elements which bring the contribution in technical and operating performances. These units are: the carrier (magnetic disks), read/write heads, a positioner (aktuator), installing a head on the necessary track and the built in controller providing handle and data transfer.

Productivity of disk drives on hard disks is defined by a number of parametres, major of which are the bit density, access time to data, the cache memory size, and also control algorithms units of the arrangement both used internal and front ends. Each of these parametres brings the contribution to disk drive productive work.

The bit density increase allows to increase size and a transfer rate at the same speed of rotation of disks. Thus the last some years the size of hard disks practically doubles each 9-12 months.

Access time to data consists of time of head positioning for the necessary track and a latency (latency) the necessary sector under a head. It is obvious, that the latency depends on speed of rotation of magnetic disks, and rate of data transfer on other subsystems of the computer depends on the front end.

The greatest distribution models with parallel interface ATA — PATA (it IDE, EIDE, ATAPI) with a transfer rate have found   of 100 Mb per second.

Optimal for desktop computers models of disk drives on hard disks with speed of rotation of disks of 7200 ob./mines, the built in cache memory of 2 Mb and size of 100‑120 Gbytes until recently were   .

However company Seagate Technology which is one of the largest manufacturers of hard disk drives, has declared recently the beginning of deliveries to Russia the first-ever drive with a bit density of 100 Gbytes on a 3,5-inch slice. It became possible thanks to application of the front lines, at least now, processing techniques in the field of record heads and magnetic media.

New topovaja the model of disk drive Seagate which is a part of the bar, received name Barracuda 7200.7, is capable to store 200 Gbytes of the information in the presence of only two slices. The given model with interface PATA and size of 200 Gbytes is supplied by the cache memory-buffer in size of 8 Mb.

Fig. 1. The disk drive on hard disks Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 with informational size of 200 Gbytes, interface PATA, the cache memory-buffer in size of 8 Mb.

On the given disk drive the standard 3-year-old guarantee of the manufacturer extends. Besides this model, in the popular bar of disk drives Barracuda 7200.7 there are variants in size 160, 120, 80 and 40 Gbytes.

All drives of Barracuda 7200.7 set differ high efficiency and are the most reliable in branch, soaking loads to 350 G in a non-working state. Besides, they are one of the most silent disk drives on hard disks in the class: in the order bookings value 2,5 bell is resulted. Such audio characteristics are reached, according to creators, thanks to application in engines of the given arrangements of this set of firm processing technique Seagate SoftSonic.

High efficiency of the given model of the disk drive is promoted by considerable speed of rotation of a spindle of the engine which makes 7200 turns in a second, and also the cache memory in size of 8 Mb and the optimised control algorithms mechanical and electronic units of the disk drive. As to concrete values of productivity they can be received only in the course of testing and matching of results with one of leaders of the given type of accessories. It also has been fulfilled. Results of the led testing of disk drive Seagate Barracuda of 7200.7 200 Gbytes and its matching from one of the upper models of the bar of IBM 180GXP which arrangements differ high efficiency are more low resulted  .

Testing of disk drive Seagate Barracuda of 7200.7 200 Gbytes

Pattern of the system used in testing

r    the Motherboard: Abit IC7-G.

r    the Processor: Intel of Pentium of 4 3.0 GHz (kernel Northwood, cache memory L2 — 512 Kbytes, working on complete frequency of a kernel, frequency FSB of 200 MHz, FC-PGA plug, in box).

r    the Disk drive on hard disks 1: HDD Seagate ST3200822A (Barracuda 7200.7, 200 Gbytes, 8 Mb of the cache memory, 7200 rpm, UltraDMA/100).

r    the Disk drive on hard disks 2: HDD IBM IC35L120AVV207-0 (180GXP, 120 Gbytes, 2 Mb of the cache memory, 7200 rpm, UltraDMA/100).

r    Dynamic storage: 2X512 Mb, DDR400, Hynix.

r    the Videoadapter: ASUS RADION 9600XT, 128 Mb DDR.

r   CD-ROM: ASUS CD-S400/A (40x).

r   OS: Windows XP.

As exercisers used WinBench  99 and High-End Disk WinMark  99.

Table 1. Results of testing

Fig. 2. Results of testing of disk drives on hard disks

The disk drive on hard disks Barracuda of 7200.7 200 Gbytes has been given by German representation of company Seagate