Seagate's 7200.10 Barracuda Series HDD include some pretty nifty features, but what are they? Seagate themselves seem almost secretive about these features, offering no more than a short blurb for each one, which hardly explains what they actually do. To help explain these features, we turned to wikipedia for a better de scri ption of Perpendicular Recording and Native Command Queuing.

Perpendicular Recording

Perpendicular Recording achieves higher storage densities by aligning the poles of the magnetic elements, which represent bits, perpendicularly to the surface of the disk platter. Aligning the bits in this manner takes less platter than what would have been required had they been placed longitudinally. So they can be placed closer together on the platter, thus increasing the number of magnetic elements that can be stored in a given area. The true picture is a bit more complex, having to do with the use of a magnetically "stronger" (higher coercivity) material as the storage medium. This is possible due to the fact that in a perpendicular arrangement the magnetic flux is guided through a magnetically soft (and relatively thick) underlayer underneath the hard magnetic media films (considerably complicating and thickening the total disk structure). This soft underlayer can be effectively considered a part of the write head, making the write head more efficient, thus making it possible to produce a stronger write field gradient with essentially the same head materials as for longitudinal heads, and therefore allowing for the use of the higher coercivity magnetic storage medium. A higher coercivity medium is inherently thermally more stable, as stability is proportional to the product of bit (or magnetic grain) volume times the uniaxial anisotropy constant Ku, which in turn is higher for a material with a higher magnetic coercivity.

Native Command Queuing
Native Command Queuing (NCQ) is a technology designed to increase performance of SATA HDD by allowing the individual hard disk to receive more than one I/O request at a time and decide which to complete first. Using detailed knowledge of its own seek times and rotational position, the drive can compute the best order to perform the operations. This can reduce the amount of unnecessary seeking (going back-and-forth) of the drive's heads, resulting in increased performance (and slightly decreased wear of the drive) for workloads where multiple simultaneous read/write requests are outstanding, most often occurring in server-type applications.

Note that while command queuing can be a tremendous help if there are multiple outstanding I/O requests, NCQ adds a small amount of overhead to single requests, resulting in slightly lower performance on some single-threaded benchmarks typical of single-user computer use. The difference is never large.

For NCQ to be enabled, it must be supported and turned on in the SATA controller driver and in the hard drive itself. Method of activation varies depending on the controller. On some INTEL chipset-based motherboards, this technology requires the enabling of the Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI) in the BIOS and the installation of the Intel Application Accelerator software.

Adaptive Fly Height
Adaptive Fly Height offers consistent read/write performance from the beginning to the end of your computing workload

Clean Sweep
Clean Sweep automatically calibrates your drive

Directed Offline Scan
Directed Offline Scan runs diagnostics when storage access is not needed

Seagate SoftSonic
The Seagate SoftSonic motor enables whisper-quiet operation

Enhanced G-Force Protection
The Enhanced G-Shock Protection provides mechanical protection against non-operational shock.

Today's HardwareLogic test bench features the following components:

 

Processor	AMD FX60 Dual Core Processor
Motherboard	MSI K8N Diamond Plus s939 Motherboard
Memory	2GB G.Skill F1-3200BIU2-2GBHX PC3200 (DDR400 @ 2-3-2-5)
Video Card	EVGA 7900GTX
PSU	Fortron FX700-GLN 700W All-In-One PSU
HDD	Listed below
Test Bench	HSPC Tech Station

All tests were conducted using Windows XP Professional w/ SP2, AMD's Chipset Drivers, and ATI's 6.5 Catalyst drivers. To remove memory as a bottleneck or cause of instability the memory divider was used to keep the memory below DDR2-800 for the AM2 system and at DDR400 for the s939 system.

To really gauge the performance of the Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3750640AS, we chose to compare it against a pair of super HDDs from the past year, the Hitachi Deskstar 500GB HDD and the Western Digital Raptor 150GB HDD.

Drive	Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3750640AS	HITACHI Deskstar 7K500 HDS725050KLA360	Western Digital Raptor WD1500ADFD
Capacity	750GB	500GB	150GB
RPM	7200 RPM	7200 RPM	10000 RPM
Cache	16MB	16MB	16MB
Interface	SATA 3.0Gb/s	SATA 3.0Gb/s	SATA 1.5Gb/s
Average Seek Time	11.0ms	8.5ms	4.6ms
Average Latency	4.16	4.17ms	2.99ms
Price Per GB	$ .55	$ .50	$1.73

HardwareLogic's testing includes the following benchmarks:

• Sisoft Sandra
• HDTach

Sisoft Sandra 2007
SiSoft Sandra (the System Analyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant)is a 32 and 64-bit Windows system analyser that includes benchmarking, testing and listing modules.For testing Hard Drives we use Sandra's Physical Disk Benchmark.
Drive Index is a composite figure representing an overall performance rating based on the average of the read, write, and seek tests, and file and cache size. The Drive Index is intended to represent drive performance under typical use in a PC. A larger number means better performance. The weighting of the results is not equal, it represents the distribution of different files sizes as used on these devices (obtained through field research).

HDTach 3
HD Tach is a physical performance hard drive test that uses a special kernel mode VXD to get maximum accuracy by bypassing the file system.
The HD Tach sequential read test reads from areas all over the hard drive and reports an average speed. It also logs the read speeds to a text file that you can load into a spreadsheet and graph to visually read the results of the test. Lower test scores are better for the Random Access benchmark. 
In addition to sequential read, HD Tach tests the drive's random access time. Random access is the true measure of seek speed. Many drives advertise sub 10 millisecond seek speeds, but seek speeds are misleading. Lower Random access scores are better. 
Finally, HD Tach tests the drive burst speed. The burst speed is the speed that data can be accessed from the drive's on-board read-ahead. Higher Drive Bursts scores are better. 

As expected, the Western Digital Raptor 150 leads the way, but not by as much as one might expect. Also of interest is how well the Hitachi 500GB Deskstar performed. While the Seagate ST3750640AS performed exceptionally, the benefit of SATA II 3.0GB/s transfer speeds are evident in the Burst Speed test, where the much larger Seagate HDD obliterated the WD Raptor.