Diskspeed32

Home » 2 TB Hard Disk Drive Battle: Seagate Barracuda LP vs. Western Digital Caviar Green[nextpage title=”Introduction”]So far only two 2 TB hard disk drives have reached the market and both are “green” models, meaning they rotate at lower speeds in order to save energy. Models spinning at 7,200 rpm will reach the market only by the end of the year (it is more complicated to build a 7,200 rpm 2 TB drive than a 5,400 rpm one) and they will be faster than these two models we are reviewing today. Let’s compare the performance of Seagate Barracuda LP with Western Digital Caviar Green.Seagate Barracuda LP spins at 5,900 rpm, while Western Digital does not disclosure the rotational speed from Caviar Green (5,400 rpm is our educated guess). Hard drives typically consume between 8-10 W; “green” models like the two we are going to compare consume practically half of this.Both 2 TB models we tested have a real capacity of 1.82 TB or 1,863 GB (3,907,029,168 sectors). As you may be aware, the capacity advertised by hard disk drive manufacturers isn’t the real drive capacity. Read our Hard Disk Drives Capacity Limits tutorial for further information on this subject.Here is a summary of the two hard drives we are going to compare:ManufacturerModelModel #BufferPriceSeagateBarracuda LPST32000542AS32 MBUSD 239.99Western DigitalCaviar GreenWD20EADS32 MBUSD 239.99Prices were reasearched at Newegg.com on the day we published this review.Now let’s see which drive is the fastest 2 TB product.[nextpage title=”How We Tested”]During our tests we used the configuration listed below and the only variable component between each benchmarking session was the hard disk drive being tested.Hardware ConfigurationCPU: Core 2 Duo E6600Motherboard: ASUS P5K-E/WiFi-AP (1013 BIOS)Memory: 2 GB Corsair Dominator TWIN2X2048-8500C5D (DDR2-1066/PC2-8500 with 5-5-5-15 timings), configured at 1,066 MHzVideo Card: Gigabyte GeForce 8800 GTS 320 MBVideo resolution: 1440×900 75 HzVideo Monitor: Samsung Syncmaster 932BWPower Supply: OCZ ProXStream 1000 WCPU Cooler: Thermaltake TMG i1Optical Drive: LG GSA-H54NSoftware ConfigurationWindows XP Professional using NTFS file systemService Pack 3Intel Inf driver version: 9.0.0.1008NVIDIA video driver version: 175.19Benchmarking SoftwareHD Tach 3.0.4.0HD Tune 2.55We adopted a 3% error margin. So, performance differences below 3% cannot be considered meaningful. In other words, products where the performance difference is below 3% must be considered as having similar performance.[nextpage title=”HD Tach”]Usually we use three programs to evaluate hard disk drive performance, DiskSpeed32, HD Tach and HD Tune. DiskSpeed32, however, would freeze exactly in the middle of the data gathering process and our best guess is that this program isn’t compatible with 2 TB drives. Thus unfortunately we had to keep it out of our benchmarking process.HD Tach provides only two results, the burst transfer rate and the average transfer rate. We ran the “long bench” test from this

 AdvertisementKeySwitcher v.0.1.1KeySwitcher is an utility which allows to switch current keyboard input layout via short click of a single button.It is designed to work in Windows OS. Except Windows 2000 and XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 are supported as well,Category: Miscellaneous UtilitiesDeveloper: keyswitcher.sintegrial.com| Download | FreeWhatsFocused v.1.0WhatsFocused is a tiny little software to show the title and executable of the focused window in Windows.Category: Miscellaneous UtilitiesDeveloper: whatsfocused.sourceforge.net| Download | FreeAdvertisementPolyphony Keyboard Manager v.2.18Keyboard Manager lets you assign shortcuts, text, and objects to over 350 keyboard hotkeys or key combinations, including function keys, for automatic, click-free activation and pasting. When you press a key combination,Category: Miscellaneous UtilitiesDeveloper: gallowaysoftware.com| Download | Price: -Quad / Dual Core Usage v.1.8This vista gadget displays the CPU core utilization in bar and the history as a graph for each core. Moreover it also displays the cores temperatures if speed fan is running in background.Shows total and per core usage.Category: Miscellaneous UtilitiesDeveloper: orbmu2k.de| Download | FreeHamsin Clipboard v.3.03A three-in-one easy to use clipboard extension utility that allows: tracking clipboard history of the last ten clips which can be later returned back to the clipboard or directly pasted into applications,Category: Miscellaneous UtilitiesDeveloper: iisr-cnc.com| Download | Price: -BenchMarkOne v.1.0CPU benchmark to help you test your system. BenchMarkOne is A cross-platform CPU Benchmark tool in Java. Uses Whetstone, with Linpack a near possibility. Used by the author to compare JVM, VM, and operating system performance. Not a STDNOJ Tool,Category: Miscellaneous UtilitiesDeveloper: benchmark4j.sourceforge.net| Download | FreeNotification Area Cleaner for Windows 7 v.1.0Clean obsolete notification area icons with this tiny utility. Notification Area Cleaner allows you to remove obsolete notification area icons in Windows 7 (i.e.Category: Miscellaneous UtilitiesDeveloper: itsamples.com| Download | FreeNIT Desktop Cleaner v.1.0NIT Desktop Cleaner is an Adobe AIR application, can keep your computer desktop free from clutter, simply sort the files in given directory into 9 newly created directories "Archives","Documents","Images" etc.Category: Miscellaneous UtilitiesDeveloper: ddd.ee| Download | FreeDirectCompute Benchmark v.0.25This software allows you to benchmark DirectX 11 latest general-purpose computing feature by calculating tons of FFT-like data and some memory transfers.Category: Miscellaneous UtilitiesDeveloper: unigine.com| Download | FreeDiskSpeed32 v.3.0.1.0DiskSpeed32 has separate functions for Windows 95/98/Me and Windows NT/2000/XP, first of them written correspondently Microsoft documents Q137176.txt . DiskSpeed32 measures reading speed in whole disk or its part and plots graphical dependence forCategory: Miscellaneous UtilitiesDeveloper: software.vgrin.host56.com| Download | Free Pages : 1 | ... | 7 | 8 | 9

[nextpage title=”Introduction”]Samsung’s SP1604N is a 160 GB ATA/133 hard drive, with a 2 MB buffer and rotating at 7,200 rpm, being part of Spinpoint P80 series. In this series you will also find models with 60 GB, 80 GB and 120 GB capacities, both ATA/133 and Serial ATA interfaces. Also, there is a version of the reviewed SP1604N with 8 MB buffer, called SP1614N, which should achieve a better performance.Figure 1: Samsung SP1604N, 160 GB, ATA/133 and 7,200 rpm hard disk drive.Figure 2: Other side of Samsung SP1604N hard disk drive.This hard disk drive is controlled by Marvell 88i6522 chip, while its 2 MB buffer is done by ESMT M12L16161A-5T memory chip. The other chip that you see in Figure 3 is an ATMEL AT49F1024 flash memory, used to store the drive’s firmware.Figure 3: Detail of the controller chip (Marvell) and of the SDRAM memory used as buffer (ESMT).The real capacity of this hard drive is of 149.05 GB, since all manufacturers assume that 1 GB is 1 billion bytes, while 1 GB is in fact 1,073,741,824 bytes (2^30).A very important detail is that your system may not recognize the drive’s full capacity, since several computers aren’t updated to recognize hard drives above 127 GB, which is the BIOS limit. There are several options if your computer doesn’t recognize the drive’s full capacity, like upgrading your motherboard BIOS or updating Windows by running Big Driver Enabler software (you can also use Samsung’s own software, called EnableBigLba).[nextpage title=”Main Specs”]Capacity: 160 GB nominal, 149.05 GB realRotation speed: 7,200 rpmAccess time: 8.9 msInterface: ATA/133Cache: 2 MB (ESMT M12L16161A-5T)Controller chip: Marvell 88i6522More information: price in the USA*: USD 90.00* Researched on on the day this review was published.How We TestedOn our benchmarking we used the following configuration.Hardware ConfigurationCPU: Pentium 4 2.4 GHzMotherboard: Chaintech CT-9CJS Zenith (Intel 875P)Memory: Two 256 MB PC3200 TwinMOS memory modules in DDR Dual Channel configurationVGA: Gigabyte Radeon 9800 ProVideo resolution: 800x600x32Software ConfigurationWindows XP Professional using NTFS file systemService Pack 1ADirect X 9.0AIntel Inf driver version: 5.00.1012ATI video driver version: 7.88 (6.14.10.6343)Benchmarking software usedDiskSpeed32We adopted a 3% error margin. So, performance differences below 3% cannot be considered meaningful. In other words, products where the performance difference is below 3% must be considered as having similar performance.[nextpage title=”Our Tests”]The software we use for measuring hard disk drive performance, DiskSpeed32, performs really long tests, since it reads all sectors on the hard disk measuring the achieved transfer rate and plotting a graph.Normally the hard disk transfer rate varies according to the part of the disk that is being read. The disk transfer rate is higher at the disk’s edge, lowering as it approaches its center. This occurs because of the zone bit recording (ZBR): in longer tracks (the ones away from the disk center) there are more sectors and more data is read at each disk spin. because of that, the software used shows three results: maximum transfer rate (obtained on the first disk cylinders, i.e., on the tracks located near the disk