You seem to know a lot for a female (nothing against females!), my hat is off to you.

Wow u really a woman? Did not expect that. :P

Yeah i know my place is in the kitchen. But i can't help myself. :'(

You might have made a mistake in your AAK vs. AAE benchmark. I have both an AAK and an AAE disk in my Debian fileserver. When benchmarking them I noticed in the boot log that the AAK was only operating at 1.5 Gbps, i.e. in SATA1 mode, not SATA2. It turned out that the AAK drive has a jumper to limit the speed to 1.5 Gbps which is ENABLED by default. The AAE does not have that. Therefore you might have tested the AAK disks with 1.5 Gbps and the AAE ones with 3 Gbps. Can you please inform us whether you noticed the jumper or not?

Besides: My AAK actually outperforms the AAE. hdparm -tT says 70 MB/s for the AAK and only 57 MB/s for the AAE. WTF?

Leo, both drives had the 1.5Gbps jumper on it and NCQ disabled, else it would not be a fair test. Even in 1.5Gbps operation though, the AAK disk should reach its maximum STR speed. That is clearly firmware (or hardware) related. Actually on some disks firmware are closely related to hardware so there's no clear line.

If you believe your AAK performs better than AAE at STR (which i doubt) then please post in the correct forum thread with more benchmarks (like DD, like i did) and filesystem benchmarks. I'll be happy to discuss them. The correct thread is:
http://www.fluffles.net/forum/topic/34

wanted to email you the transcript of a chat I had with a Seagate tech support guy, but, it says the function is not yet available. *puzzled*

hi, sorry for the delay. If you'd like to send me email please do so, info at fluffles d0t net

Hi,

Thank you for your Seagate AAK vs AAE firmware article, it was an interesting read.

I too was mildly surprised about your gender. Then again, in my engineering classes women were always an unfortunate and severe minority. Now in the workplace it seems even more askew.

Well, I'm impressed you wrote all the code for this site. Presumably it's running FreeBSD? Why FreeBSD and not Linux? You like little red devils more than penguins?

Anyways, I had a minor beef to pick with your forum policy rule #5:

Rule #5: Anonymous proxies are prohibited
This site does not allow for stealth "anonymous" proxies to be used. If you do, you'll get banned. These proxies exist only for the purpose of hiding your true identity and that can never have honorable purposes.

Not only is the wording harsh, but it's also unfortunately inaccurate. There are occasions where hiding one's true identity does have honorable, and indeed necessary purpose. One obvious example is that of any country where speech is restricted, and one can be arrested or even put to death for participating in the wrong conversations. I'm thinking specifically of China here, but it is not the only example, and is probably not the worst example. While your site in of itself may not seem to belong in prohibited territory, you should also be aware that if one is attempting to conceal identity it is safer to be consistently concealed, and cover up all your tracks, even to seemingly innocuous places. Furthermore, a person may initially be using such a proxy and come upon your site accidentally, through a link from another site. Should such a person be banned? If they signed up for your forum, then upon discovering your policy, stop using the anonymous proxy, but with the same user account as they created before, they then put themselves at risk of the that user ID, and thus that user, being traced to a real IP address and location.

It is probably more of an academic than pragmatic concern, but I hope you will reconsider your stance on the utility of anonymous proxies, and your forum policy for such users.

Just want to say thanks for the Seagate's AAK-firmware article, I thought I was the only one out here with lemons. over the last week it's been getting more popular, as I am getting more relevant search results every day.

Flip the drives over and check 2 things.

The controller on the drives should be Agere or ST. ( Big chip )
The smaller square chip should be ST or Agere or TI .

See that there is no difference between the drives you tested. If there will be a difference in chips. that is what causes the speed difference.

Seagate (as do all other drive manufacturers) buys parts from multiple vendors. Sometimes one vendor can not supply fast enough. Not all parts are equal. Firmware differences mean typically HARDware differences ( could also be the preamp / head or platters... )

anyway it is not so that you could put AAC firmware on a AAK drive. that will NOT work. Firmware is tuned for a SOC (big chip) / PCU (small chip)/ PREAMP (cant see it because its on the headstack inside the cavity) / Headstack and platter combination.

Any variation in that setup has a different firmware version.

AAK / AAC and the likes is NOT a 'revision' number but a MODEL number !.

Who am I ? : suffices to say that i make the silicon for harddisks ...

Great article and I have posted to Seagate's support forum hoping to get some clarity.

hi! where r u? bye arne