Seagate is one of the major hard drive manufacturers. While initially strong in the OEM-market for customers like Dell and HP, Seagate broke through in the retail market with their 7200.10 series hard drive.

The 7200.10 disk was the first generally available desktop drive featuring perpendicular recording. This feature stores the information vertically instead of horizontally on the platters, thereby increasing the data density. This made higher capacity disks cheaper to produce and offer excellent performance. Their sequential throughput actually superseded that of the performance king; the Western Digital Raptor which runs at 10.000rpm instead of the usual 7.200rpm.

All was good, until reports on the internet claimed that some 7200.10 disks had much lower performance than other 7200.10 disks. They soon took blame on the firmware of the disks, named AAK. Disks with other firmware, AAE or AAC, performed as expected.

What is firmware?
Firmware is small software stored in the hardware itself. This allows manufacturers to fix bugs or tune performance without needing to make changes to the hardware itself. Perhaps most known are BIOS updates, which update the software running on motherboard whenever you power up your computer. Sometimes manufacturers release firmware updates, allowing users to update the firmware contained in the hardware, thereby resolving bugs or add additional performance and features.

The claims
Benchmarks are posted all over the web by people who want to know if the hardware they just bought actually performs within specs. Some owners of the Seagate 7200.10 were disappointed that their disk did not perform as presented in various benchmarks found on the web and posted HDTune screenshots like the one below:



Please take care to look at the scale of both graphs, on the left side is the AAE disk with a scale up to 80MB/s, on the right is the AAK disk where the scale goes up to 60MB/s. So where the AAE disk starts at 75MB/s the AAK disk starts at less than 55MB/s, a 20MB/s difference!

Another thing to notice is the horizontal line of the AAK disk, whereas it should be a decaying line such as on the left.


First reactions
My response, initially, was that of skepticism. Seagate is a large and professional manufacturer of hard drives. They have a lot of expertise in the OEM-market and more recently a breakthrough in the retail market. Their 7200.10 drive has done good in the marketing and in reviews found all over the web. And now potential customers are wary of buying a Seagate because they might get one of those ugly AAK-drives?! Has Seagate gone off the track and produced bad firmware that will jeopardize their cash-cow? Or are the claims greatly exaggerated and are AAK-drives perfectly fine?

I was very motivated to find out. I could not believe Seagate would make the mistake of ruining their cash-cow by some stupid firmware. Yet - as people ran more exhaustive non-synthetic tests their claims persisted. Time to do some really thorough testing and draw my own conclusions!