U320 SCSI HDD ROUNDUP

Seagate Cheetah 15K.4

Seagate is now the largest manufacturer of HDDs on earth.  Aside from recently purchasing Maxtor, Seagate also merged with Conner Peripherals, also a HDD maker back in the day.  Seagate's numerous accomplishments include the first 750GB HDD, the first 10K and 15K RM drives, and also the first 7200RPM non-SCSI drive. 

The Cheetah series is widely regarded as the fastest family of HDDs ever made.  And, Seagate is not slowing down either.  Below is the 15K.4, and the next page is the hot new 15K.5.

Click on the logo above to view the Cheetah webpage at the Seagate website.

HD Tach 3.0.1.0 RW, 8MB Zones: Burst: 213.8 MB/s, Ave. Read: 78.5 MB/s, Ave. Write: 72.3 MB/s, Random Access: 5.7 ms, CPU: 1%

HD Tach 3.0.1.0 RW, 32MB Zones: Burst: 214.0 MB/s, Ave. Read: 78.5 MB/s, Ave. Write: 76.6 MB/s, Random Access: 5.7 ms, CPU: 1%

HD Tach 3.0.1.0 RW, VAR Zones: Burst: 213.6 MB/s, Ave. Read: 78.6 MB/s, Ave. Write: 77.5 MB/s, Random Access: 5.6 ms, CPU: 1%

For some unknown reason, the 15K.4 exhibited a major drop in write speed at the larger data sizes.

The strange anomaly repeats itself in the RAID_0 test below.  The performance however, is not too bad, showing a near-doubling of read speeds.

For RAID_1 below, the graph again shows the same strange drop in writes.  Reads show a slight increase over a single drive.