Highest wave top - poluterabajtnaja the Barracuda

Evgenie Rudometov,

Victor Rudometov

authors@rudometov.com

Company Seagate Technology has developed recently and has released the ninth generation of the 3,5-inch hard disk drives, by tradition received name Barracuda. The model in size of 500 Gbytes with interface Serial ATA became the high representative of this bar 

Hard disk drives (HDD) concern the major units of modern computer systems. Their technical parametres from year to year improve. And first of all it concerns growth of the information capacity providing saving of the increasing sizes. This growth is provided mainly at the expense of increase in density of an information storage at magnetic disks. This metric increased for a long time twice everyone year-one and a half.

However it is necessary to mark, that the last some years rate of overgrowth of size of the magnetic disks which are a part HDD, has considerably decreased: doubling time has increased till 2-2,5 years. It testifies to practical reaching for a long time already predicted, but all time of a removed limit for existing processing techniques of a data recording/reading. As is known, these processing techniques are grounded on traditional parallel layout of magnetic domains (miniature units with which help writing and an information storage is carried out) in a magnetic layer of disks HDD.

But, despite all difficulties, manufacturers continue to release more and more perfect arrangements. Within the limits of traditional processing technique of parallel writing, contrary to objective difficulties, they increase information capacity of the products. And as show numerous researches, requirement in capacious HDD remains rather big. It is linked not only to evolution of the computer architectures demanding new HDD, but also with fast development of sector of consumer electronics where hard disk drives have essentially pressed traditional media.

According to inquiries of the market of computer systems and arrangements of consumer electronics company Seagate Technology (Seagate) continues to increase information capacity of released hard disk drives. Within the limits of next, already the ninth bar 3.5-inch HDD, received official name Barracuda 7200.9, the upper model is poluterabajtnyj the disk drive. Appearance of the given model is presented in a Fig. 1.

Fig. 1. Hard disk drive Seagate Barracuda of 7200.9 500 Gbytes

The important features of the given model are the built in cache memory in size of 16 Mb, and also serial interface Serial ATA with a transfer rate to 300 Mb per second — SATA/300 (a Fig. 3).

Fig. 2. The controller and SATA/300 plug of disk drive Barracuda of 7200.9 500 Gbytes

Besides, given model supports processing technique NCQ, providing the raised speed of processing of sequence of simultaneously arriving inquiries to HDD on reading and a data recording. This processing technique provides storage of inquiries and optimises queue, minimising number of movings of heads on disks that reduces unproductive time and increases the common speed of data access.

In a Fig. 3 marking of model Seagate Barracuda of 7200.9 500 Gbytes with interface SATA/300 is presented .

Fig. 3. Marking of 500 Gbytes of model Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 with interface SATA/300

Considering the specified high model, it is necessary to mark, that besides it in the bar of disk drives Barracuda 7200.9 there is also a variant with the same size of 500 Gbytes, but with interface Parallel ATA/100. The low representative of the given bar is the arrangement with size of 40 Gbytes. All bar consists of following models: 500, 400, 300, 250, 200, 160, 120, 80, 40  Gbytes.

Table 1. Key parametres of models HDD Barracuda 7200.9

Size of models, Gbytes	From 40 to 500
Interfaces	Serial ATA/300 with NCQ or Ultra ATA/100
Size of the cache memory, Mb	16, 8, 2
Speed of rotation of disks, rpm	7200
Access time, msec	11
Admissible shock loads, g	By operation – to 63, At storage – to 350
Band of an operating temperature, With	0-60
Acoustic noise level, Bell	2,5
Guaranty period, years	5

Model 500 of Gbytes incorporates four hard disks. Other disk drives contain from one to three disks.

As to concrete values of productivity poluterabajtnoj models in widespread applied tasks they can be received only in the course of testing.

As measurement standards to which the given high model was compared, earlier released high-powered disk drives used. These products are the upper models of bars Barracuda 7200.8 and Barracuda 7200.7.

Pattern of the system used in testing of hard disk drive Seagate Barracuda in 7200.9 size of 500 Gbytes:

·         the Motherboard of Intel D925XCV (a chip set i925X, memory DDR2, the slot of video PCI Express x16, ports PATA and SATA),

·         the Processor of Intel of Pentium 4 with clock rate of a kernel of 3,4 GHz (LGA 775, kernel Prescott, the bus of 800 MHz, processing technique Hyper-Threading),

·         the Disk drive on hard disks 1: HDD Seagate ST3500641AS (Barracuda 7200.9, 500 Gbytes, 16 Mb of the cache memory, 7200 rpm, SATA/300),

·         the Disk drive on hard disks 2: HDD Seagate ST3400832AS (Barracuda 7200.8, 400 Gbytes, 8 Mb of the cache memory, 7200 rpm, Serial ATA/150),

·         the Disk drive on hard disks 3: HDD Seagate ST3200822AS (Barracuda 7200.7, 200 Gbytes, 8 Mb of the cache memory, 7200 rpm, SATA/150),

·         Dynamic storage 2 x 512 Mb, DDR2 533,

·         ASUS EXTREME AX 600XT Videoadapter (chip ATI Radeon X600XT, bus PCI Express x16),

·         the Optical CD-ROM drive: ASUS CD-S400/A (40x),

·         the Operating system: Windows XP.

As the testing tool known package Winbench 99 used .

In Table 2 – Table 3 and in a Fig. 4 – Fig. 5 are resulted results of comparative testing.

Table 2. Results of performance of test Winbench 99 Disk Transfer Rate

Models HDD	Winbench 99 Disk Transfer Rate
	Beginning	End
500Gb SATA	59900	33200
400Gb SATA	68100	40200
200Gb SATA	65100	37100

Fig. 4. Results of performance of test Winbench 99 Disk Transfer Rate

Table 3. Results Winbench 99 High-End Disk WinMark 99

Models HDD	Winbench 99 High-End Disk WinMark 99
500Gb SATA	42700
400Gb SATA	48500
200Gb SATA	44300

Fig. 5. Results of performance of test Winbench 99 High-End Disk WinMark 99

From the resulted results of testing follows, that disk drive Seagate Barracuda of 7200.9 500 Gbytes with interface SATA/300 possesses not only a high capacity, but rather high efficiency.

However it is necessary to mark, that the tested model concedes on a transfer rate to high representatives of previous bars Barracuda 7200.8 and Barracuda 7200.7, 400 size 400 and 200 Gbytes. Probably, it is linked by that the given copy concerns the first representatives of serial models and the subsequent copies with the improved code firmware will appear more high-speed.

Hard disk drive Barracuda in 7200.9 size of 500 Gbytes has been given by company EAST SIDE Consulting