SUMMARY: Seagate has just launched their brand new Barracuda 7200.8 hard disk drive for the consumer desktop market which promises to offer blazing fast performance. In this review of the new drive we compare the new 7200.8 against the older generation Barracuda 7200.7 as well as the Western Digital Raptor. In the wild you wouldn’t expect a Raptor to be scared of a Barracuda but the food chain just might have made a bit of a change in favour of the big mean tropical fish.
Processor(s): Intel Pentium 4 3.46GHz EE (1066 FSB) (Supplied by Intel) Motherboard(s): ASUS P5AD2-E 925XE / ICH6R (Supplied by ASUS) Memory(s): OCZ 2x 512MB PC-5400 (Supplied by OCZ) Video Card(s): ATI Radeon X600 128MB Operating System Used: Microsoft Windows XP Professional SP1 Drivers Used: Intel INF 6.3.0.1008, DX9c and ATI Catalyst 5.2
We choose to use the ASUS P5AD2-E motherboard based on the Intel 925XE chipset with ICH6R south bridge since it is one of the few chipsets which support NCQ. Brand new chipsets from nVidia and VIA support NCQ but the ASUS board was readily available to us hence the reason it was used. The Intel ICH6R provides the connection to the system for the SATA hard drives in our benchmarks.
We’ve compared the new Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 against itself with NCQ enabled and disabled (disabled NCQ by changing the IDE configuration in the BIOS from AHCI to Standard IDE) as well as against the mighty Western Digital Raptor 74GB and an older Barracuda version, 7200.7 without NCQ support. WD’s Raptor supports TCQ (Tagged Command Queuing - similar to NCQ) but not many chipsets support TCQ at this stage. During our testing the Raptor was without any form of command queuing.
Unfortunately Seagate only sent us a single 400GB drive so we were unable to perform any RAID 0 testing but this is something we would like to look at in the future, hopefully with the 16MB cache versions.
It’s the new and old generation 7200 rpm Seagate Barracuda drives up against the consumer level 10,000 rpm Raptor from Western Digital. Let’s see if the new Seagate drive can keep pace with the faster spindle spinning Raptor.
HD Tach has been around for a long time and is excellent when it comes to testing hard drive performance. It is also a very handy program when it comes to testing the controller used on particular motherboards. Tests such as Read, CPU Utilization and Burst are available at a click of the button and give you a good idea of how the hard drive can perform from system to system.
Our first test shows us the average read results of each drive. Interestingly the Barracuda 7200.8 with NCQ disabled is quicker than when enabled – we re-tested to make sure our results were correct and they were. However, even more intriguing, is the fact that the Barracuda is only a little slower than the Raptor with the older version 7200.7 lagging behind the new version.
Next up is burst speed and this is where we were really shocked. The new Barracuda with NCQ disabled provided a massive burst speed of 126MB/s which kills the Raptor which could only manage 118.3MB/s. Again we re-tested the results several times and we found them to be correct. The 7,200 rpm drive from Seagate is quicker here than the 10,000 rpm drive from WD.
This goes to show Seagate has spent a lot of time tweaking the internals of their new drive for much better performance than the older generation drive.
Here we see CPU utilization and the new Seagate drives continue glowing.
Here we see that 7200.8 with NCQ enabled come out in front for a change but the Raptor is easily able to take the win here with its faster spindle speed. No surprises here.
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