Modifying the Seagate 1.5TB Hard Drive: Unleash the Hidden Performance Within

[nekrosoft13]

Introduction
As many of you know, recently Seagate released one of the largest consumer drives on the market: the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31500341AS . The drive’s capacity is 1.5 TB (1500 GB) or approximately 1.397 TB. The drive specifications are decent and Seagate itself announced that this drive will be able to handle 120 MB/sec sustained transfer rate. All of us know that these rates will not be across the whole drive and were most likely obtained under the best possible conditions. That being said, we still can not overlook the fact that a 1.5 TB drive’s speeds place it directly in the Velociraptor territory. After discovering this astonishing speeds people normally bust out their Western Digital Velociraptor drives and start benchmarking them for comparison. So, what do they get? Velociraptor obviously wins in all categories – max speed, min speed, average speed, access time, you name it and it wins it. At this point they label the Seagate drive as second best and close the case. Of course thats the point, the Seagate drive was not meant to compete with the Velociraptor which is a performance drive and is instead targeted towards good performance and high storage capacity. So end of story right? . . . What if I told you there was a way to modify the 1.5TB Seagate to unleash the hidden beast within. . .


for the rest go here

http://www.techwarelabs.com/seagate_1-5tb-mod/

[shabby]

Interesting, but also pretty obvious if you think about it. But its the seek times that make the velociraptor(and ssd's) so desirable.

[CaptNKILL]

What exactly causes the drive to be faster when you decrease its capacity?

[Roliath]

I think this is basically short stroking the drive, so you don't read across the whole platter.

[CaptNKILL]

I think this is basically short stroking the drive, so you don't read across the whole platter.

So, it just uses the fastest part of each platter, so that you never access the slowest parts of the drive?

Not a bad idea, though it seems like a bit of a waste.

And since when is a 7200.11 considered a great drive? :lol:

EDIT: You know, something was bugging me about this and I think I just realized what it is.

All this is doing is tricking the benchmarks into reporting higher numbers. Forcing the drive to only use the first 300Gb isn't going to make it perform any differently than if the data is properly defragmented and is already at the beginning of the each platter. Hard drive benchmarks test transfer rates at various parts of the drive, so the average speeds are influenced by parts of the drive that you may never use. By limiting the area the drive uses, you're just limiting the area that the benchmarks will test.

I have a hunch that this will bring little to no actual performance improvement outside of benchmarks.

[Starscream]

How about a mod to increase the reliability of those pieces of crap?

(nana2)

[Thunderbolt56]

I don't record/download movies (or even music for that matter) and have never even filled a 500GB HD.

SO, I'll stick with my VRaptors. Besides, have you seen these benchmarks....

lol