The Seagate GoFlex Desk already ships with the new Barracuda ST3000DM001 drive!

Today, Seagate consolidated three sub models of the Barracuda hard disk drive line into one. The new Barracuda is a 7200 rpm drive that the company claims combines the efficiency of their Barracuda Green with the performance of the Barracuda XT. It turns out that I had one of these drives in my hands for a few months, since they have been shipping in the GoFlex Desk external hard disk drive for a while.

The Green Revolution

See What Is The Secret To Efficient Hard Disk Drives? for more info!

“Green” hard disk drives were all the rage for the past few years. Market leaders, Seagate and Western Digital as well as challenger Samsung all produced “green” drives. The three manufacturers claims that these drives drew less power and were thus more appropriate for the bulk storage needs of end-users.

Each manufacturer used a different technique to accomplish this low-power trick. Samsung’s offering was a traditional 5400 rpm hard disk drive that squeeze out efficiency by using fewer platters, heads, and other drive components. Their EcoGreen F2 hard disk used three or fewer high density platters, but my own experiences were not all that positive. I had to EcoGreen drives called out in my Drobo.

Western Digital’s Caviar Green was much-lauded in the press, with many believing it was a variable speed drive. This turned out not to be the case, with performance gains due to firmware tweaks and a simple 5400 rpm mechanism. I had fairly good luck with my half-dozen or so Caviar Green drives, though I didn’t notice they were particularly energy-efficient or performant.

Seagate was the only vendor to try something really radical in the “green” space, introducing a 5900 rpm mechanism with generous and dense platters. Initially called the Barracuda LP but later wearing the Barracuda Green name, these drives were popular for a balance of performance and energy efficiency. I bought a number of them myself, and although they weren’t that fast they were just fine for bulk external storage needs.

I Feel the Need for Green

Consumers weren’t exactly beating down the doors of drive manufacturers asking for low-power hard disk drives. Rather, these drives were born from a need to conserve power mostly in external add-on storage applications. Although 3.5″ drives cannot be bus powered in a USB enclosure, low-power is still a major benefit. Smaller adapters, simpler electronics, and less heat enable the production of cheaper and simpler external drives.

And it’s not as if a USB 2.0 drive can actually benefit from a high-performance hard disk mechanism. With a maximum transfer rate under 40 MB/s and seriously reduced I/O performance, USB 2.0 just didn’t need much in the way of performance. Even today, USB 3.0 drives, like the Seagate GoFlex Desk poke along way below the capabilities of that interface. No rotating hard disk drive will deliver true USB 3.0 performance, and he remains a major concern in the extra drive market.

The New Seagate Barracuda

You gotta love hard disk drive hero shots like this!

I already had one of these! See How To Open a Seagate GoFlex Desk Hard Disk Drive Case

Apparently, there just wasn’t enough market demand even for an industry leader like Seagate to produce three separate hard disk drive lines. So the company’s new lineup is consolidated on a single specification: 7200 rpm, 64 MB of DDR2 cache, and 1 TB platters. These drives will be available in 1 TB, 1.5 TB, 2 TB, and 3 TB capacity points and are apparently already shipping as the innards of GoFlex Desk external storage.

Note that these new drives apparently use the 4 KB “Advanced Format” sector size rather than the old 512 byte sectors. This means you’ll want to use them with new versions of Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X for compatibility and performance reasons. But my GoFlex Desk drive did not appear to be using 4 KB sectors when I examined it. I remain puzzled by this inconsistency. Seagate does include their “SmartAlign” technology, which helps avoid the performance impact of misaligned volumes, however.

Performance-wise, the new Barracuda exceeds its predecessors in terms of sequential read and write time, but it’s no great shakes when it comes to random I/O. Although somewhat faster than the previous generation 7200 rpm drive, not to mention the 5900 rpm Green, a generation spoiled on SSD is not to be impressed by these drives. In terms of bulk storage, however, they’re hard to beat. Considering that the 3 TB GoFlex Desk is available for under $150, these drives are a steal.

Seagate promises a hybrid flash-packing Barracuda XT in the future, and this should represent a serious performance improvement. But tests of the existing hybrid Momentus XT show mixed results, and many have complained of unreliability and buggy firmware. Hopefully this third-generation of Seagate hybrid storage technology will be a keeper.

It will be interesting to see how Western Digital reacts to this shift. Will they to drop their 5400 rpm “green” drive in hopes of simplifying their product line? Or will they continue on with no competition? The transition from USB 2 two USB 3 is well under way, and consumers will likely notice the difference in performance. Perhaps we have finally seen the and of 5400 rpm drives.

Stephen’s Stance

Increasing hard disk drive density always brought better performance, and Seagate’s use of faster spindle speed will help as well. My only concern is the increased heat generated by these new drives: My GoFlex Desk drives are definitely hot to the touch when in use. But the availability of 3 TB drives is to be welcomed at this price point.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2011. | No More Green Drives from Seagate
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Terabyte home. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Ask a Pack Rat:

Another great question, this time on Twitter:

Just purchased an empty DroboFS, do you have a preferred HD to use with Drobo? TIA!

Stephen’s Stance

I just love my Drobo, though I’m thinking of upgrading it to a Drobo S since it’s getting pretty full! The ability to add and replace drives as you use it is very powerful, and I’ve taken full advantage of it! Here’s my own personal Drobo hard disk drive history:

1. Purchased the Drobo and two 1.5 TB Samsung EcoGreen F2 (HD154UI) drives from NewEgg. One drive was DOA.
2. Grabbed a 1 TB Western Digital Green (WD10EADS) drive from Fry’s to protect my data. No trouble with that one.
3. Received a replacement Samsung HD154UI. Worked fine since, though it did fail to spin up at first this week after a power reset.
4. Removed the 1 TB WD drive and added two 1.5 TB Western Digital Caviar Green (WD15EADS) drives. No trouble with those since.
5. Picked up a 1.5 TB Seagate Barracuda LP (ST31500541AS) as a temporary standalone drive as well as a spare for the Drobo.

I’ve been very happy with the Western Digital and Seagate drives I used – every one has performed flawlessly. There are many negative reviews of just about every drive on the market, including both the WD and Seagate models I rely on. And I’m much less happy with the Samsung EcoGreens. They’re proven flaky in my use, and I’m very glad I am using Drobo’s BeyondRAID or I would never store anything important on them!

My suggestions:

1. Vary the type and manufacturing date of drives (easier with Drobo BeyondRAID) to reduce the likelihood of a “bad batch” causing problems
2. Go for 1.5 TB or 2 TB drives since they’re the best value for the money at this point
3. Green (5400/5900 rpm) drives are fine and may reduce your power consumption
4. Stick with the Seagate Barracuda LP and Western Digital Caviar Green (EADS or EARS) drives
5. Make sure you buy from an authorized reseller and have a valid warranty (Seagate offers 5 years on retail drives, WD is 3)

I’ve been posting cheap drives to my Deals feed lately, and will likely continue. $79 for this 1.5 TB WD Green drive is a pretty good price today, for example.

Note: Some of these links include affiliate codes that help pay for this blog. For example, buying an Amazon Kindle with this link sends a few bucks my way! But I don't write this blog to make money, and am happy to link to sites and stores that don't pay anything. I like Amazon and buy tons from them, but you're free to buy whatever and wherever you want.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2010. | Which Hard Disk Drives Should You Use In A Drobo?
This post was categorized as Ask a Pack Rat, Terabyte home. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

I’ve been in the trenches on storage content (aka data) for a long time. I, too, have often reverted to the old “gigs of MP3s and porn” argument from time to time. But I’ve done enough filesystem assessments at real companies to realize that that’s not really the norm. In fact, I’ve rarely found much porn, music, video, or jokes on full-up corporate file servers. And I’ve analyzed enough storage environments to know that, while file servers are big, they’re not normally the majority user of storage in large data centers.

On the contrary, most enterprise storage is taken up by business applications, though not necessarily critical data. Email, backup, and certainly user file servers are big space users. But give me a few Oracle instances, source code repositories, or image processing servers, and watch those applications shrink in significance.

No matter what the application, though, the real issue with storage growth (and ILM) is the (in)ability of IT managers to do anything about it. Let’s say we had permission to delete really inappropriate data, which is not a sure thing. Would we IT folks even be able to recognize it? How would we locate it? Can we even view user files without violating user trust, company privacy policies, or even laws? Many countries (yes, not all data is in the USA), regulate access to data even inside a company.

Now let’s move into grayer areas of “unnecessary” corporate data. Many storage administrators can’t even name the applications that take up all that space, let alone understand the intricacies of the data under management.  To make a timely (and tired) Harry Potter analogy, IT are the house-elves of the business – powerful but subservient, with little input into what happens above and around them.  I’ve talked to business people who don’t want IT to have any input, relegating them to order takers and laborers.

This is a dangerous slide, however.  Lots of people have the capability to take IT orders and keep the lights on,  a realization that leads to outsourcing.  IT pros must prove their worth to the business in order to remain relevant and irreplaceable!

ILM is one way to do that.  To get back to Chuck’s post, we need to take the reins and try to understand data better.  We need to pick certain applications that lend themselves to automated data classification and tiered storage and try to get them under control.  Email is a great candidate, and that’s why email archiving applications have taken off recently.  File servers are coming along, too, especially with file virtualization in the ascendancy.

I’m particularly excited about what a smart IT manager I know called the “second wave” of SRM tools.  Rather than just collecting stock metadata (age, name, owner, etc), the latest filesystem scanning tools look inside a file, trying to better classify them.  Let’s say 1/4 of your file server is made up of Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents.  What can you do about that unless you can identify which are critical and which are not?  Each business will have its own criteria, and you need a flexible tool to scan them all and report back to you before you can “ILM” them.  That’s what lots of software vendors are currently working on, and though we’re at an early stage still, the results are promising.

Sadly, though, we in IT may soon find that we just can’t delete anything.  Even totally banned content like porn could be critical to a legal case against an employee,  and it won’t be long before we are expected to keep everything that shows up on our servers for a very long time.  Most companies have policies for hardcopy document retention, and many are currenyly diving into the world of data policy as well.  The default policy may be “keep until we decide what to do with it”, and this could cause the current trend of storage growth to accelerate!

If we can’t delete data, we will be forced to sail the Titanic rather than sink it.  Small companies can benefit most from the falling price of storage, since the entire storage footprint for a little shop is often under a terabyte.  But larger organizations will find that they need to start tiering their storage, and quickly in order to keep prices under control.

And then there’s green storage.   Again, Mr. Toigo makes the very valid point that the problem is in the business, not in the hardware we use.  But if we can’t do anything about data growth for the time being, we had better start tackling the technical challenges we face.  I’ve talked to many IT folks who are very worried about data center space, as well as the terrifying trio of heat, power, and cooling.  For them, green technologies are no laughing matter!  If you can’t get any more power, you have to lower your per-GB requirement and quickly.

It’s easy to say “understand your data and delete some”, but hard for IT pros to  actually do it.  Until we can tackle the strategic issue of data growth, we’ll have to continue fighting the tactical problems of storage.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2007. | Sailing the Titanic (Why We Need ILM and Then Some!)
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.