Mod your Barracuda into a Velociraptor killer

Peter G. 16 Jul, 2009 at 1:17pm ET Article published in Tech

Techware Labs has found a way to turn the 1.5TB Seagate 7200.11 hard drive into a WD Velociraptor fighter. You lose drive capacity but gain performance for half the price of the WD drive.

Comments

18 Jul 2009 ~ 1:44am Snarkasm Now THAT'S fairly interesting.
18 Jul 2009 ~ 3:39am Linc Damn.

/me sighs about his shiny new Velociraptor
18 Jul 2009 ~ 3:44am shwaip DO WANT.

(perhaps a raided pair...)
18 Jul 2009 ~ 5:06am DrLiam Now this is worth bookmarking! Thanks for sharing.
20 Jul 2009 ~ 9:06am patrickcabenjamin I'm just wondering why they give computer parts such wierd names
20 Jul 2009 ~ 9:38am GnomeQueen Because it makes me want to buy them more?
20 Jul 2009 ~ 10:04am AlexDeGruven This is great. I was actually thinking about putting a RAIDed pair of VelociRaptors in when I build my HTPC later this year/early next year. But this article has made me think better of it. I like that at 819GB, the drive still outperforms the VelociRaptor pretty handily.

Since I'll also be building a big RAID for external storage, I might see if I can land myself a bulk price for a bunch.

It also seems that, with the slower spindle speed, you'll probably get better long-term viability than you would with the 10k drive.
20 Jul 2009 ~ 10:46am mas0n

AlexDeGruven wrote:

It also seems that, with the slower spindle speed, you'll probably get better long-term viability than you would with the 10k drive.

No.

This is pretty interesting; I'll keep my lower access times though.
20 Jul 2009 ~ 11:05am lordbean

mas0n wrote:

No.

This is pretty interesting; I'll keep my lower access times though.

I dunno... I bought a single WD Raptor drive back in the day, and it failed after 3 years. It's so far been the ONLY WD or Seagate drive I've ever owned that has ever failed, period. Makes me suspect the 10k spindle, too.

Either way, that's a pretty sweet article right there. Who needs a Raptor when you can just tell a Barracuda to use half its space... I wonder if it works on the 7200.12 series?
20 Jul 2009 ~ 11:20am AlexDeGruven

mas0n wrote:

No.

In the Enterprise space, this is probably true. But we're talking about consumer-grade hardware here. In 99.9% of cases, though, the insanely high MTBF on modern hardware pretty much negates my statement, but I thought it would be worth mentioning.
20 Jul 2009 ~ 1:03pm mas0n It's also worth noting that this whole operation is just so that you can flaunt your HDTach scores. This basically just marks off the fastest 20% of the disk so you can test it without including the slowest 80% of the drive. If I did this with a Velociraptor I'd see sustained transfer rates averaging >135 MB/s

For the same results but less awesome benchmarks, just partition the first 300GB of your 1.5TB drive and use it for OS/Programs, then dump your My Documents folder on the 1.2TB partition that's left.
20 Jul 2009 ~ 3:08pm ardichoke

mas0n wrote:

For the same results but less awesome benchmarks, just partition the first 300GB of your 1.5TB drive and use it for OS/Programs, then dump your My Documents folder on the 1.2TB partition that's left.

I doubt this would work. Any time you accessed a Document then the system had to load a system file you would have to move from the slowest part to the faster part thus negating any performance increase. The reason that the mod works, most likely, is because the heads never move out of the fastest tracks on the drive.
20 Jul 2009 ~ 3:59pm mas0n You're correct about the heads obviously, but I don't think it would totally negate the benefits and you get to keep the "slow" 80%.

I think it really depends how often the specific user needs to access files on the second partition. For boot times, application load times, gaming, and tons of other uses, the heads could stay in the primary partition.
20 Jul 2009 ~ 4:06pm shwaip Heh - or if you had indexing enabled on the second partition.
20 Jul 2009 ~ 4:19pm mas0n balls

well at least that should only happen while the machine is idle.
6 Apr 2010 ~ 7:12pm drasnor I'm amused that I get the same benefits automagically by partitioning for a dual boot Windows/Linux system.
6 Apr 2010 ~ 9:57pm ardichoke Not entirely though.... the disks read/write heads will still leave the inner tracks any time a file is needed from a partition on the outer tracks. Modding the drive like this article suggests ensures that the heads never leave the inner tracks no matter what because, as far as the drive is concerned, the outer tracks don't exist.