Enlightenment
Administrator
 105 posts | Bought a Seagate 7200.10 drive and got disappointing benchmark results? Maybe you have a drive with AAK firmware!
I tested the differences between 7200.10 disks with AAK and AAE firmware and came to interesting conclusions. Read the article here:
Seagate's AAK-firmware
This topic serves as feedback and further discussion of this article. Take control of the input and you shall become master of the output. |
Sander
Unregistered | Hey! Great article!
Ofcourse i'm also very interested in the response from Seagate. I got two AAK drives and both exhibit the same problem as described in your article.
I also got loud beeps every hour or so, did you notice those too? |
Enlightenment
Administrator
105 posts | I did not hear any beeps or other strange sounds from the tested disks. I also do not believe there is any evidence of AAK drives offering lower reliability. It is simply a question of performance. Take control of the input and you shall become master of the output. |
Xirian
Unregistered | Very interesting! I also have an AAK and AAJ drive. The AAK is made in China and i got the same problem. I wrote Seagate about it but i still have to receive a reply. I hope i can swap them back, else i'll bring them back to the store.
I don't think i'll be buying Seagate drives in the next future.  |
Some One
Unregistered | Odd, I happen to have two 400 gig identical model Seagate drives and one is AAK. There are definately differances between that and the other.
I have nearly all seagate drives in my computer (about 6 seagates purchased in last couple years, and the main exception is the WD raptor) because of thier 5 year warranty, but now I will have to reconsider. I was seriously thinking of getting a 1 TB drive, now I think I will have to look at WD or Hitachi for that. |
Sol
Unregistered | It would be helpful if one could identify the firmware without opening the box -- e.g., by country of manufacture or serial number. Buying, formatting, installing and then querying to get the firmware (followed by returning if it's an AAK) is a lot of work. |
aussie
Unregistered | Seagate offer AS and NS spec'ed drives - where NS is supposed to be rated for 24/7 use. From the last image on page 6 it looks like you were using an AS rated drive. Can you perform the test again with an NS rated drive to see if the problem is not due to the product use rating? |
dhindes
Unregistered | I have 2 500 GB AAK drives, and I was able to replicate the results on both. However, I think that HDTune may be part of the problem. When I reran the benchmarks with ATTO Disc Benckark (available from http://members.home.nl/rvandesanden/ATTO%20benchmark.html) I got better results: 82MB/s write and 70MB/s read. HDTach shows speeds between HDTune and ATTO. I don't have an AAE drive to compare. |
cp
Unregistered | | Posted on 29 August 2007 @ 08:08 | edited 30 Aug |  |
Hi. I've got a PATA 7200.10 with 320G and 16M cache. The SiteCode is WU == Made in China. It was bought in 2006. Firmware is 3.AAC
Last month, I bought a new 7200.10 with 500G (this time a S-ATA-drive). It has the SiteCode TK == Made in Thailand. Firmware is 3.AAK
Both drives are used in external USB enclosures, so I never benchmarked it. I post this only because it was said, that the Chinese drives are the slow ones and Thais are fast.
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cp
Unregistered | And just another comment to the article, page 7:
"How to discover the firmware version?"
-> I looked on the cover of the drives  |
Enlightenment
Administrator
105 posts | aussie wrote: Seagate offer AS and NS spec'ed drives - where NS is supposed to be rated for 24/7 use. From the last image on page 6 it looks like you were using an AS rated drive. Can you perform the test again with an NS rated drive to see if the problem is not due to the product use rating? Aren't the 24/7 drives marketed as Barracuda ES drives? Just like Maxtor's MaxLine and WD RAID Edition. The drives i tested are the normal thing.
If you have an ES drive, you can simply run HDTune and see if you have got a horizontal line in it. If so, it will probably exhibit the same performance as the AAK tested in the article. Take control of the input and you shall become master of the output. |
Enlightenment
Administrator
105 posts | dhindes wrote: I have 2 500 GB AAK drives, and I was able to replicate the results on both. However, I think that HDTune may be part of the problem. When I reran the benchmarks with ATTO Disc Benckark (available from http://members.home.nl/rvandesanden/ATTO%20benchmark.html) I got better results: 82MB/s write and 70MB/s read. HDTach shows speeds between HDTune and ATTO. I don't have an AAE drive to compare. The difference between HDTune and ATTO is, that ATTO tests on the filesystem (NTFS/FAT) and thus enjoys optimizations such as read-ahead and write-buffering. HDTune on the other side, is a strongly synthetic benchmark that reads directly from the device. The scores of HDTune are not representative of real performance, although in this case it did produce an abnormal figure which leaded to suspicions and finally my article.
The scores from HDTune are low because it reads with a blocksize of 32KB. When looking at the DD-tests we can clearly see the AAK performing poorly with such low blocksizes. For real performance tests, you need a more advanced benchmark than either HDTune or ATTO. Take control of the input and you shall become master of the output. |
volcano
Unregistered | I've got a firmware AAD. Any info on that? |
craig001
Unregistered | Were these results consistent for both SATA and PATA interfaces? I have a 500g 7200.10 SATA drive from China. But it was really inexpensive at Circuit City a couple of months ago. |
Enlightenment
Administrator
105 posts | volcano wrote: I've got a firmware AAD. Any info on that? I have not spoken people who had any confirmed performance problems with drives other than AAK. I think any disk other than AAK will be fine.
craig001 wrote: Were these results consistent for both SATA and PATA interfaces? I have a 500g 7200.10 SATA drive from China. But it was really inexpensive at Circuit City a couple of months ago. I tested only the Serial ATA versions. But i do not believe the interface changes anything, it's an internal issue (firmware). As such, it should not matter if you are using Parallel ATA or Serial ATA disks.
It's possible all AAK-disks have a Serial ATA interface. Take control of the input and you shall become master of the output. |
Enlightenment
Administrator
105 posts | Some statistics:
Unique visitors linking to Seagate AAK article: 13.000
Total hits to Seagate AAK article: 52.000
Quite impressive i think.  Take control of the input and you shall become master of the output. |
Frovingslosh
Unregistered | I have a Seagate 500 w/ AAK firmware, and a much cheaper Maxtor 500 with AAE firmware. I can confirm the problem, my Maxtor on an SATA/150 interface well outperformed the Seagete on an SATA/300 interface. The Seagate dorped very very slightly when moved to the SATA/150 interface, indicating that it is so bottlenecked that it can't take advantage of the SATA/300 at all. It is well below the less expensive Maxtor on the same interface.
I tried contacting Seagate. Tech support on-line chat was a farce. Waranty replacement wanted me to call tech support and ask for level 2 support. I called, asked for level 2 but the guy I was talking to (very heavy Indian accent) kept putting me on hold and talking to them. Tech support was not knowledgable. Eventually I got an e-mail with a link to a firmware update! Not sure yet if the firmware will even install, or if it does if it will fix anything or if it will destroy the drive. Still backing up all my data before I try the firmware update. |
Frovingslosh
Unregistered | An update to my previous post:
My AAK drive is indeed made in Thailand, not China.
The firmware that I was sent an e-mail for is 3AAE firmware. Expecting that this will not run on this hardware, I have sent a questioning e-mail to Seagate before installing it.
Based on the discussion here that HDtune may be in part the issue, I ran benchmarks with PCWizard 2007. PCWizard found very very little difference between my AAK Seagate and my AAE Maxtor on the same SATA/150 interface (will have to cycle the system several times to do the test on an SATA/300 interface as my ASUS MB only has one SATA/300 internal port available). So HDtune may indeed be a part of the problem, but it is still of concern that HDtune sees this significant difference. Without Seagate giving any clue to why AAK exists or what the expected differences are I still am concerned that any testing software sees a difference. And PCWizard does see a difference in favor of the Maxtor AAE firmware alos, although it is extremely slight (more tests are needed to confirm that the difference is not just a random variance in measurement, it's that close). I plan to try some others tests as well before destroying the hardware with the firmware flash. But it's certainly a big negative against Seagate that several days after I read of this problem on Slashdot and here and measured it on my own system that Seagate tech support apparently did not know about it, and that they gave me AAE firmware for AAK hardware.
While I'm very disapointed by Seagates lack of knowledge on this, I've long been a "Seagate only" advocate. I paid extra to get this Seagate drive with it's 5 year warranty. Yes, I know they only replace the drive and not the data, but it's important to me that Seagate backs the Seagate line with a 5 year warranty while some other drive makers say they would go out of business if they honored even a 3 year warranty! I don't understand why Seagate offers only a 3 year warranty on their Maxtor line; almost bought another Segate 500 rather than my Maxtor 500 because of this, but a sale price on the Maxtor and the fact that I only intended to use it for archive non-critical stuff made me elect to buy the Maxtor a few months after I bought my Seagate 500. I'm shocked to find out the Maxtor with AAE firmware is a better drive that the more expensive Seagate 500 AAK drive.
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Keigotw
Unregistered | Frovingslosh, did you try to update the firmware?
can you post a link for the firmware, so that others can try it?
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Omion
Unregistered | I agree with Keigotw. Post the link!
I have a big fat RAID made out of 7 AAK drives (grr...) so I wouldn't have any problem losing one or two to a bad firmware update. I'll happily be a firmware guinea pig!
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