Seagate 7200.7 performance 80 GB vs 200 GB

[halfadder]

I have seen performance reviews for the 200 GB model of the Seagate 7200 RPM drive... but I don't need that much space! I only need about 15 GB! So I am much more interested in the 80 GB model. But I have heard that larger drives of the same family are generally faster than the smaller drives due to having more platters and more heads for parallel reading/writing. Is this true? Would the 200 GB model be noticeably faster than the 80 GB model?

 

[jvarszegi]

I picked the 7200.7 160GB at ZipZoomFly because it was the only one under 300GB (and $400) to support Native Command Queueing. This will be my first experience with NCQ, but it supposedly gives a large performance boost to random disk access. It's only $112, a decent price for that much somewhat-fast storage. However, if you're only using 15GB on your one-and-only drive, do you really need lots of speed on your drive? Chances are you could go even smaller and cheaper.

 

[formulav8]

I don't know if I would expect much of a noticable increase in performance due to ncq. Just my opinion


Jason

 

[jvarszegi]

Originally posted by: formulav8
I don't know if I would expect much of a noticable increase in performance due to ncq. Just my opinion


Jason

Well, the proof is in the pudding, for sure. That's just a decent price for one of those drives, and I'm sort of getting the NCQ for free. Maybe I'll run some tests for myself... Anandtech and other sites have reported gains of around 20% for some tasks, and very slight but negligible degradation for some others, with some other results in between. I'm not hoping for much performance benefit in games, but I could see how it could come in handy when compiling a large bunch of code, etc.

Here's the thing, too: this will be a system drive, so even with caching enabled in the OS, I can expect more random access than on a storage drive, no? I think it'll help. How much, I don't know yet.

 

[Dethfrumbelo]

The 200GB is faster than the 80GB by a fair margin, if for no other reason than the platter density is higher: 80GB vs. 100GB per platter. Benchmarks bear this out.

 

[jvarszegi]

Originally posted by: Dethfrumbelo
The 200GB is faster than the 80GB by a fair margin, if for no other reason than the platter density is higher: 80GB vs. 100GB per platter. Benchmarks bear this out.

Right, which is also in favor of the 160GB that I picked.

 

[Sheriff]

Originally posted by: jvarszegi

Originally posted by: Dethfrumbelo
The 200GB is faster than the 80GB by a fair margin, if for no other reason than the platter density is higher: 80GB vs. 100GB per platter. Benchmarks bear this out.

Right, which is also in favor of the 160GB that I picked.

Well the 160GB would have 2X80 gig platters as opposed to 100X2 so if htere is a speed increase it would be because of the NCQ and the Mobo must support it to see max gains. Just a thought.

 

[CraigRT]

Originally posted by: Dethfrumbelo
The 200GB is faster than the 80GB by a fair margin, if for no other reason than the platter density is higher: 80GB vs. 100GB per platter. Benchmarks bear this out.

I am also pretty sure the 80gig has 2 meg cache, and the 120 is the first with 8meg cache, but I could be wrong for SATA drives, that's how it was for their IDE drives last I remember.

 

[jvarszegi]

Originally posted by: Sheriff

Originally posted by: jvarszegi

Originally posted by: Dethfrumbelo
The 200GB is faster than the 80GB by a fair margin, if for no other reason than the platter density is higher: 80GB vs. 100GB per platter. Benchmarks bear this out.

Right, which is also in favor of the 160GB that I picked.

Well the 160GB would have 2X80 gig platters as opposed to 100X2 so if htere is a speed increase it would be because of the NCQ and the Mobo must support it to see max gains. Just a thought.

Nope, I don't think so. I believe that the 160GB probably has two 100GB platters, with the second one partially disabled. This is common in drive manufacture, and the specs for the drive state that it has a 100GB/platter density. What you said is common sense, but you can't always do straight math with drive capacity. This is because drive manufacturers find it easier to have a few well-defined factory processes, but they want the flexibility of multiple price points in the marketplace; that's why they often disable useful drive capacity.

I'm planning to get an nForce 4 board, which will support NCQ.

 

[halfadder]

The 80 GB model is available in both 2 MB and 8 MB flavors.