http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96dWOEa4Djs&fmt=22

" OS Windows XP Professional
OS updates Service Pack 2"

I wonder what kind of performance we'd see on an Operating system less that 4.5 years old. Ah well, guess we can only dream.

And yes I know you are changing the benchmarks soon. I can only imagine there are serious memory and disk I/O issues resolved with newer drivers and OS patches since that time. Yes it's good for legacy. But you are making recommendations based on such archaic hardware, shouldn't we get an updated platform also?

Damn it. Western Digital has already been raising prices over the past month (92 to 104 euro minimal price). More bad news for Seagate means higher prices for Samsung and especially WD drives, it seems.

Bring back the 5 year warranty. Until then I'll stick with WD black edition drives.

Adi

Has Seagate made a drive worth purchasing since the Barracuda ATA IV? It was quiet, which was good. But all of their drives since have offered poorer performance and at best equal acoustics/power consumption to other manufacturer's drives.

*click*click*click*click*click*click*death

No matter what "silent" improvements they do.

http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/research/recording_head/pr/Perpendicu...

Remember to turn up the sound!

Wow what a POS this drive is, time to go back to the drawing board seagate.

I really hope they are working on some SSD tech!

are there no extenuating circumstances with the drives for this review, cause these stats are just terrible.

What a disappointment.
A 2 platter drive from 2009 should not lose to a 5 platter drive from 2007 in any test. Seagte should be ashamed that they have released this product.

Years ago, Maxtor was the drive you wanted. Then they sucked and it was all about the Western Digital. Then WD sucked and it was all about Seagate. Now Seagate sucks again and its either Samsung or WD depending on who you ask.

I used to be an avid fan of Seagate drives, but after having some issues with them and all the recent problems, I avoid them in a manner similar to that used by the entire female population of the planet to avoid me.

Right now hard drives (i think) are kinda a bottle neck, but i can never bring my self all the way through the reviews...

So much for quality control when one of the two drives sent for the review *FAILED* (ok, not bricked, but still failed...) ? But perhaps there's something to Seagate's quality control afterall, since you don't see these beasts on the shelves yet.

Might as well, since I think HDTach is the only test that goes through the full capacity of the drive (?); and midway failure is indicative of drive failures down the road (after it's filled up with your data).

And what's with the ultra slow random access time? Indicative of 3600 rpm class performance (Ronald Reagan...). By spinning at 7200 rpm (avg rotational latency is 4.16ms), random access time supposed to be significantly better than 5400 rpm class drives. In the diskdrive speaks, the 7200.12 servo technology sucks... Servo just means knowing where I am and where I need to go. To spend 17+ms doing that is just unthinkable in this century.

If the 7200.12 is a sign of what to come, Seagate seems to be catching the Maxtor disease...

Seagate has announced plans for an enterprise-class Constellation ES 2TB hard drive
I think Star Trek had it the right way round...
The Constellation Class "Enterprise" NCC 1701 :)

Bring on the SSD review!

I've always wondered if hard drive reviews were worth the read. This one sure was.

Seems like they missed the mark on several benchmarks. IO meter doesn't bother me that much (my F1 performs well enough), but to come out even worse is a big disconcerting. Several others seem spotty. Raw read/write seems good at least.

That plus the recent firmware debacle seems to be quickly putting Seagate in the figurative doghouse. I stopped trusting Maxtor 10 years ago and haven't bought one of their drives since. IBM's business tanked and had to be sold when they had issues and Hitachi never seemed to be back in the running performance wise even if they shook IBM's deathstar reputation. I think Seagate is now having a turn at bat in the failbox.

I think the comments here are proof that consumers are very quickly scorned by HDD failures. I think rightfully so. I hope consumers always keep extreme pressure on HDD manufacturers to make reliable drives for hopefully obvious reasons. It's hard to really benchmark reliability, so we have to look at warranties and widespread failure issues as a gauge, as flawed as that may be. And at the end of the day, we have to vote with our money to motivate manufacturers.

It's too bad, they had a good run. I still have a few in my system, bought primarily on the 5 year warranty, good performance, and quiet operation, and they're holding up fine after a few years. Spotty benchmarks following a fairly widespread failure issue is not a good sign now.

So... I should still be pretty happy with my 640 GB WD dual-platter drive by the looks of things.

Ouch indeed. I wonder if there will be a firmware update that will allow for 'performance' or 'quiet' modes. IIRC, that's how OEM's like Dell set the option in the BIOS.

So, not that quick and not offered in nice, huge ridiculous sizes like the WD 2TB.
Oh Seagate, how the mighty have fallen.

Looks like WD is back on top, these 2 have been at it for years, shame the 2TB is so expensive :/

Where's my 1.5TB drive at 149$ US with 3x500gb platters - need this soon, don't care who makes it :(

Given the recent fiasco and this review's 50% "problem" rate, I think I'll just avoid Seagate until they get their act together... WD it is for me until they screw up.

Geoff - I think you should try a different program other than HDTach for random access times. If you recall from one of the previous HD articles we got in to a discussion about that and it turned out that different programs get different numbers. It may have been in the Seagate 1.5TB article I'd have to look.

seagate needs to fix their controller problems. even then unless WD messes up, I am not switching to seagate.....

Ouch. Seagate got pretty battered in this comparo. Was not pretty.

Thanks for the review.

I have to admit that although I will be in the market for a few 1TB drives soon, I completely skipped this review. I just don't trust Seagate right now.

I have intermittent issues with my 1.5TB Barracuda, and other than an RMA to get another drive which may or may not have the same problems or worse, I don't see what I can do.

I might look at Seagate desktop drives again some day, but it won't be for a while.