New Seagate 2TB HDD - 6Gb/s Transfer Speed!

[Zephik]

AND it's backwards compatible with 3Gb/s controller interfaces so you don't have to worry about compatibility issues. It's got 64MB of cache and the standard 7200RPM in a 3.5-inch form factor. Pricing is starting out at $299 and is supposedly shipping out now, although nobody is really sure where to find one.

http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/09/21/seagates-new-2tb-hard-drive-pushes-6gbs-transfer-speed/

[slaveofconvention]

Um, I was under the impression that the current physical limitations of the hardware inside physical disk HD's meant that the drives didn't push the 3Gbs limit anyway - will this actually make any real-world difference? If it was an SSD, then hell yeah it would, but with a platters setup, idn

[BuzzKillington]

I thought the RPMs and transfer speeds were directly related?

[Zephik]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA#SATA_6_Gbit.2Fs_.28Third_generation.29


While even the fastest conventional hard disk drives can barely saturate the original SATA 1.5 Gbit/s bandwidth

Now that's interesting. I never knew that.

[slaveofconvention]

This is the main reason there's usually only about a 5-10% improvement between a IDE and a top end SATA drive - it's getting better as the technology improves - the thing making the most difference is the data density - the problem the HD manufacturers have to deal with now is, as the data density goes up, keeping the rotational speed up while maintaining data read/write integrity is a bit of a pain

[x88x]

Yeah, no platter-based storage that I know of can even hit 3Gibps (well, at least no consumer stuff; I'm not sure about those 146GiB, 10k, 2.5" SAS drives). What Seagate is really trying to impress everyone with is that they have the first SATA3 compatible drive. ...which, as has been noted, doesn't really mean all that much atm.

EDIT:
@Buzz: kindasortanotreally. They are often related, but recently, high data density and large cache sizes have been catching up; thus why the 1TiB WD Black drive gets performance similar to the Velociraptors.

[mDust]

Basically this is what I get out of that article:
Seagate threw the new SATA interface on their drive and proclaimed 'We have the fastest drive!'. :facepalm: The new SATA interface has a theoretical bandwidth of 6GB/s which is overkill for ALL modern hardware. There is nothing that will come anywhere near that anytime soon. Any manufacturer can put that on their drive, but that doesn't speed it up in any way...it's still probably a crap drive. This is a pretty good example of predatory marketing...they are preying on consumers that equate bigger numbers with performance while not necessarily understanding what said numbers even mean.
In this case, it means Seagates' crappy drive could theoretically spit out 6GB/s if they could figure out how to read a 500,000RPM disk.:rolleyes:

[Indybird]

The only Sata3 stuff I'm gonna buy will be SSDs.

'Nuff Said.:smoker:

-Indybird

[crenn]

This won't make a different to performance unless there is new features in SATAIII that I don't know about. Only SSDs will get upto real SATAIII speeds (about 768MB/s).

Personally, when these babies come down to a affordable level (around AUD$200) then I'll probably pick up a few.

[si-skyline]

It sounds interesting, i belive the reason for the 6gbs is just the inprovement in technology. it may not serve its perpose yet but will later down the line.
You have to remember that all these companys are independant and it take someone to make the new technology first for the other to make the motherboard for it.. etc. a lot of people now have 64-bit processors but still use a 32-bit operating system.

Just a new step forward and a reason to stick a big tag on it

[Zephik]

Why don't they just make a hard drive with multiple actuator arms? Wouldn't that increase read and write speeds? I don't see why it wouldn't work, but then again, that's why I'm asking. As for making room for the second arm, use smaller equipment? Laptop hard drives are pretty small compared to desktop hard drives, so why not use that technology but inside of a desktop sized chassis. That should give plenty of room for a second actuator arm and whatever else you need. or maybe not?

Random note: This is pretty hysterical...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive#Form_factors

http://www.toshiba.co.jp/about/press/2004_01/pr0801.htm

Edit: Another thought... why not just build a self-contained RAID drive? A normal sized drive with multiple smaller hard drives inside? Throw in a tiny raid controller, plug in the small drives and boom. done. Hell, you could probably build one yourself if you could find a small enough raid controller that works for laptop drives.

[mDust]

Data transfer rate

As of 2008, a typical 7200rpm desktop hard drive has a sustained "disk-to-buffer" data transfer rate of about 70 megabytes per second.[41] This rate depends on the track location, so it will be highest for data on the outer tracks (where there are more data sectors) and lower toward the inner tracks (where there are fewer data sectors); and is generally somewhat higher for 10,000rpm drives. A current widely-used standard for the "buffer-to-computer" interface is 3.0 Gbit/s SATA, which can send about 300 megabyte/s from the buffer to the computer, and thus is still comfortably ahead of today's disk-to-buffer transfer rates. Data transfer rate (read/write) can be measured by writing a large file to disk using special file generator tools, then reading back the file. Transfer rate can be influenced by file system fragmentation and the layout of the files.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive#Form_factors

If they can't fill a 300MB/s bandwidth, why would they upgrade to a 768MB/s bandwidth?
There is absolutely no performance gain to be had to justify the price tag. There is no reason to upgrade to SATA 3 yet. None. Seagate is just ripping off the gullible consumers.


Another thought... why not just build a self-contained RAID drive? A normal sized drive with multiple smaller hard drives inside?
Nobody has tried to do that because there are enough reliability issues with normal mechanical drives. Adding more complexity to a drive only increases the chances of something breaking, rendering the whole drive useless and creating a pissed off customer that just shelled out $500 bucks. They probably haven't done it with SSDs yet because they're still working on the capacity issue. Once they get some larger SSDs selling, manufacturers could start playing around with uber performance models such as internal raid configurations and such. You'll know they're here when you hear trumpets playing in the sky...:D

[slaveofconvention]

Why don't they just make a hard drive with multiple actuator arms? Wouldn't that increase read and write speeds?

The way the current arms work would make this effectively useless. The arms pivot on a single point which means it's up to the rotation of the disk to get the data into the right place for the arm to be able to swing across and read it. Using a second arm would only help IF the data being read was in exactly the right place, probably 180 degrees from the original read location. The chances of this happening by chance are infinitesimally small. I suppose the drive could be built so it is designed to work this way - effectively putting RAID0 on a single drive so every bit written is split into the two areas so the read system would work, but I expect the time it'd take for the firmware to split the data effectively, and the time it'd take to recombine it would put a big lag on the improvement, in the same way as you don't get anywhere near 2x the throughput of a single drive in comparison with two in RAID0.

I actually started typing this to say "Nah, wouldn't work" but as I've typed and thought about it - it probably would - the only issue I can think of would be a higher failure rate - twice as many arms would mean failure of an arm would be twice as likely...

Quick, run and patent the idea - may well make you a small fortune!!!

[Zephik]

Turns out someone already has a patent on it from way back in the day.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/seagate-hdd-harddrive,8279.html

It's probably best to just stick to SSD's now that they're pretty widely available. Now with the new SATA 6Gb/s standard, thats reaching PCI-E x16 speeds isn't it?

They should work on making software having smaller footprints or whatever. That would speed things up, wouldn't it? 10gigs transfers faster than 20gigs, the problem is turning that 20gigs into 10gigs without loss of quality or anything like that. Is there a theoretical limit for that kind of thing? Like certain data can be made only so small or whatever. gah, I'm not sure how to explain it, my brain is trying to go to sleep on me. lol

[x88x]

Idk, honestly I think it's pretty cool that Seagate is starting to put out SATA3 drives, I mean, somebody's gotta go first, right? And controller manufacturers aren't gonna make controllers if there aren't any drives to control. As for everyone complaining about the cost...have you seen the cost of 2TB drives? I'm assuming the price in the original article was for a retail drive (not OEM)...
Retail 2TB Barracuda RK (5900 RPM, 32MB cache): $230 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148487)
For the increase to 7200 RPM and the doubled cache, I don't really see the $70 increase being that bad even if it didn't have SATA3 compatibility.


Another thought... why not just build a self-contained RAID drive? A normal sized drive with multiple smaller hard drives inside? Throw in a tiny raid controller, plug in the small drives and boom. done. Hell, you could probably build one yourself if you could find a small enough raid controller that works for laptop drives.

That's what OCZ Apex SSDs are.



It's probably best to just stick to SSD's now that they're pretty widely available. Now with the new SATA 6Gb/s standard, thats reaching PCI-E x16 speeds isn't it?

PCIe 2.0 x1 = 500MBps
PCIe 2.0 x16 = 8GBps == 16Gbps >> 6Gbps

EDIT:
btw, just to put it in perspective, by the time SATA3 is pervasive, PCIe 3.0 will probably be mainstream at 1GBps per lane, or:
PCIe 3.0 x16 = 16GBps == 128Gbps

[mDust]

I believe serialata.org is math challenged:

Q15: What’s the real-world data transfer rate of SATA 6Gb/s?
A15: The realizable transfer rate across a 6Gb/s SATA link depends on the efficiency of the controller design on both the host and device sides of the interconnect. The SATA 6Gb/s interface transmits information at 600MB/s, however not all 600MB/s are realized as the user data payload because the protocol includes other data and handshaking communications between the host and device. In general, the SATA interface is very efficient. Realized transfer rates are typically very close to the theoretical maximum, which is one of the primary benefits of SATA technology for mass storage devices.
http://www.serialata.org/documents/SATA-Revision-3.0-FAQ-FINAL.pdf

How do they figure this is even 6Gb/s?
(I used the SI standard because serialata.org did.)
6,000,000,000 [bits/sec] / 8 [bits/byte] = 750 [MB/s]
Last time I checked, 600MB was quite a bit less than 750MB...and according to serialata.org it doesn't even run at the full 600MB/s. The 600MB/s is theoretical and somewhere between 500-600MB/s is what we'll see.

600 MB X 8 = 4800000000 bits or 4.8Gb/s. Shouldn't they be advertising this as "SATA 2 1/2"?:think:

Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

[x88x]

The b->B conversion is often approximated as 10->1 instead of the actual 8->1 when dealing with data transfer protocols, both to account for throughput overhead, and to make consumers happy when they get faster numbers than they were estimated.

[mtekk]

The b->B conversion is often approximated as 10->1 instead of the actual 8->1 when dealing with data transfer protocols, both to account for throughput overhead, and to make consumers happy when they get faster numbers than they were estimated.

It's not an estimation, the actual protocol was a 10 bit character protocol (like PCI-e, though I think they're changing both of them), 8 bits data, the rest for error detection I'd assume (not exactly my field of study).

I've also wondered about having two arms (double the number of heads). One issue is reliability. The probability of failure increases quite a bit with the added arm (something we don't want, and it's worse than "twice as high"). As for making it work for data reading/writing, theoretically you'll cut the seek time in half (from 12ms avg to 6ms avg (for a 1TB 7200RPM drive)), but unless you are simultaneously reading/writing different files, or reading/writing files that take up more than 1/2 of a track ring, read/write performance will remain the same. Though, such a system would actually read fragmented files faster than defragmented files :) (just as defragmenting makes no sense on SSDs, and is not practical to do on modern disk based drives (I thought defragmenting a 20GB drive was slow, a 200GB drive was worse, and I scoff at defraging a 2TB drive)).

[mDust]

the actual protocol was a 10 bit character protocolAha! I figured I was wrong. It happens a lot...:D
Maybe someone can enlighten me as to why I (as a consumer) should consider buying a HDD with crazy bandwidth potential that it cannot use. Perhaps it's less of a gimmick than I suspect.

[x88x]

Ah, here we go. Don't know why I didn't look this up earlier :facepalm:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SATA3#SATA_6_Gbit.2Fs_.28Third_generation.29
As it turns out, 3rd gen SATA also includes a number of improvements in the protocol and drive control (I'm not gonna list them all, follow the link if you're interested), so you would be getting that improved functionality...once you can get a 3rd gen SATA controller...

Also, as I mentioned in a previous post, the SATA interface is not the only thing that they changed in this drive. Incidentally, the 2TiB WD Black (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136456) has the same specs except for using 2nd gen SATA (3 Gib/s), and it's also $300

[mDust]

I saw the wiki page too, but the new improvements don't look very impressive.


The enhancements are generally aimed at improving quality of service for video streaming and high priority interrupts. In addition, the standard continues to support distances up to a meter. When was QoS ever an issue? I've never had a problem streaming video...what are people streaming that causes quality issues?

I didn't see this though:

Ten channels of fast flash can actually reach well over 500 MB/s with new ONFI drives, so a move from SATA 3 Gbit/s to SATA 6 Gbit/s would benefit the flash read speeds. Pretty crazy!
The new SATA interface has a theoretical bandwidth of 6GB/s which is overkill for ALL modern hardware. There is nothing that will come anywhere near that anytime soon.I was wrong again...
The disk in the OP is nothing to get excited about, but SSDs and these ONFI drives hooked up to the new SATA 6Gb/s should be jaw droppers.
HDDs will probably never reach SATA 3Gb/s speeds but SSDs will, and it looks like some have already come close to saturating SATA 6Gb/s!

[x88x]

IMO, not on a marketing level, but on a technical level, it's probably more about conforming to new standards than anything else. Seagate has always been pretty quick to hop on new standards, from my experience. They hopped on 2nd gen SATA pretty fast, so it stands to reason that they would get on 3rd gen fast too. I'm sure we've all heard the rumors floating around that Seagate is planning on getting into the SSD market sometime in the next year or two, and maybe they just want to make sure that there are 3rd gen SATA controllers available to interact with 3rd gen SATA SSDs.

EDIT:
Or maybe they just know that they're gonna have to convert all their drives eventually, so why put 2nd gen stuff in a new drive that they know they're gonna have to upgrade, when they can just do 3rd gen from the start.