I've had 3 of these drives. All three have failed. The first one worked 2 days, then stopped mounting. The second one lasted 18 hours, crashed my computer. It would not reformat, and the computer geeks could not do anything with it. The 3rd one (a replacement of the 2nd) would not mount at all. Only a clicking sound the first time I plugged it in. I've heard they've had problems with these drives. Do not buy until they get the kinks worked out of it.

PowerMac G5 Quad

What many people forget in cost analysis is the bay costs money too. If you are using an enclosure, they run about $25 for one drive and $50 for a dual drive enclosure. Each enclosure needs its own power adaptor, so it is not fun using a stack of drive enclosures.

While the analysis of performance is nice most of that performance is lost when the drive is placed in a USB enclosure or such. The question of concern I have is how much heat does the drive produce, and how reliable is the drive?

I bought two of these a couple of weeks ago, and one arrived DOA--didn't spin up at all. The other one is very fast and quiet, but disappears from the system after waking the machine from sleep. I never had any problem like this with the set of 4 Barracuda 7200.8 drives that it replaced, so that's been extremely disappointing. When the replacement for the DOA drive arrived, it had the exact same problem with sleep. The Gigabyte GA-P35-DQ6 board they're on has both Intel and Gigabyte SATA controllers, but the results are the same on either. I'm going to move one of the drives into a server that never sleeps. Maybe the other one will fare better in my wife's Dell, but if not, I'll have to send it back.

YMMV, of course.

Why is FC-test version tested not downloadable or obtainable anywhere? It was released as beta by xbitlabs 4 years ago, they have a download for the older original FC-Test from 6 years ago but no update or download for the new one. I'd like to have this test suite to run myself. There's also an FC-Test v2.0 build 1005 which xbit has used in some of their own reviews.

Also, THG (yea, I know) got around 13.5ms random access not ~15ms like TR.

First, thanks for the review. I'd been wondering when TR or any pro site for that matter was going to get down n dirty with one of these. Reason being that I was strongly looking toward buying some which at this time I've already done, the high capacity sold me and I spammed everywhere I could to see if the seek noise was reasonable. From these tests the drive is a schizophrenic Jekyll and Hyde beast, great at some things and average to poor at others. Funny thing is some of the tests on the first few pages are so close in absolute and percentage terms that it makes drawing strong conclusions seem like reaching just for something to say.

One thing about the test that did not match my use though was the seek time. You guys used HDTach here, I used HDTune but in my experience the two have always been close. I got ~13.5ms average, using an ICH9R with AHCI drivers installed and enabled in BIOS. The latest driver vesion (preinstall setup) is 8.5.0.1032 dated 8/18/2008. I know I asked about updating the storage platform and was told ICH7R is good enough and it will probably be updated with the next SATA revision. Fair enough - I'm not going to argue that point too much - but those drivers you're using are horribly outdated, they're from what, 2006 or earlier? I wonder if this makes part of the difference I saw from your tests.
Intel page link: http://downloadcenter.intel.com/filter_results.aspx?strTypes=all&Pr...ctID=2101&OSFullName=Windows+Vista*+64&lang=eng&...[com]

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Non article specific....something that's been bugging me ever since the site update. This article was posted yesterday and I've visited numberous times but only saw it because I carefully looked at the full column on the left. If I hadn't I still would not have seen it. There needs to be prioritization for newer articles to show as the top one, or maybe make the three most recent be 'featured' ones with a larger picture and heading. I know this isn't the first time I've kind of missed an article but it's time to put the feedback out there.

Well, after seeing this my new system will still be 1 velo 150 and 3 Caviar black ^^

The author seems to overanalyze the drive's performance characteristics. The fact that filesystem writes are very slow while raw writes and all reads are very fast suggests that the drive has a high throughput and high seek time, as confirmed by the other tests. The slow filesystem writes are almost certainly caused by seeks to the journal and back; enabling write caching (or using an external journal, in *ix) ought to speed up the tests dramatically.

Excellent article, Geoff.

This HDD was clearly engineered to a multimedia and archiving solution. It is still up to task of doing general desktop tasks. 7200.11 1.5TB's read performance is not as bad as it seems for its intended market.

Besides, reading performance matters that most with server related loads (frequent reading/writing). Raptor and its high-RPM, low-capacity SAS rivals are favored for that.

The lackluster performance is entirely from being new platter density. Remember how each first-generation HDD of a new platter density always has lower performance then older stuff? It is because HDD guys always take it easy and try to prove anything new before they start to tweak it for better performance.

You're forgetting the main purpose of the 1.5TB drive. In a HTPC or network drive mainly serving up video files (especially HD video), its high read speeds and multi user read performance is much appreciated.

In fact, that's exactly what I have my seagate 1.5 TB drive doing in my PC, while my WD RE2 drive plays system drive.

Disappointing, but not unexpected: higher areal densities are usually correlated with higher access times as well. WD managed a great feat by substantially trimming their access times in their Caviar Black (WD*AALS/FALS) range from what they had in their older Caviar Blue (WD*AAKS) range, but this is very much the exception rather than the rule. And access times still matter quite a bit today.

Time to migrate my NAS's RAID array! ;)

I'd prefer a 2 platter 750. Two or four of those on a good hardware RAID controller....

I just don't like having more than a few hundred GB of non-redundant storage.

And how long till 7200.12 anyways?? I want a 150-300GB Seagate 10K.1 SATA too.

I've already got a WD Blue 640GB for a system drive and am now looking to replace the three old storage drives with something. Can't really decide between this one and a WD Green 1TB 32MB...
This one has got a bit better performance but I'm also looking at case temperature and energy efficiency... The new three-platter 32MB WD Green is supposed to be 10-20% faster and more energy efficient so that makes it a good rival... Even two of those might be cooler, more efficient and still deliver more diskspace... Price is about the same/GB... Hmmm, one of lifes hard choices! :)

This is the perfect media storage drive. It has fast reads and performs well with multiple access so should do well over network access. Three of these with a good raid 5 controller will give a whopping 3 TB of storage.

The write performance is very disapointing, I think for my uses, this drive is pretty useless other than a backup or archiving drive, kinda like the more mainstream SSDs with their bias for read performance. Western Digital mechanical drives are still my first choice for storage.

I was just looking today at replacing 5 HDD's with one of these. Good timing. :)

Great review!

Looks like the extra mass of the heads for the 4th platter are killing their seek times. In spite of that, it still looks like a decent drive, especially if you're going for maximum capacity above all else.