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Now thinner, lighter, and cooler

Many believe that a hard disk drive line will remain the same from the time of the first launch to the end of life but this is far from the truth. Many times hard drive manufacturers will release refreshes to their product lines to improve on certain aspects such as performance as well as physical aspects of the product.

Seagate has done just that with a soon to be released refresh of certain models in the 7200.9 Barracuda line of desktop drives. Information which has been dropped in our laps tells us that the 40GB, 80GB, 120GB, and 160GB models in the 7200.9 desktop hard drive line will feature a smaller physical design among a few other changes.

The first change will be to the height, or thickness, of the drive from 26mm to 20mm which is said to allow better air flow and lower acoustics. The drives will also have the PCMA flipped over to reduce the risk of damage from handling as well as a reduction in EMI or electromagnetic interference. The drives will also have a reduction in weight from 500g to 366g.

We have also learned that the refreshed models are beginning to ship and we may see the new physical specs on store shelves soon. There has been no official word from Seagate on this release but the actual models will appear on shelves soon enough that additional confirmation should come very quickly.

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Reliability issues?
By slashdotcomma on 8/9/2006 1:25:42 PM , Rating: 1
Hopefully they're more reliable, I've had 4 300GB 7200.9 (in two separate machines) fail after a little more than a month.




RE: Reliability issues?
By SunAngel on 8/9/06, Rating: -1
RE: Reliability issues?
By ksherman on 8/9/2006 2:06:36 PM , Rating: 3
well, im pretty sure they didnt make 100GB harddrives back in '91, but i could be wrong ;-)


RE: Reliability issues?
By Goo on 8/9/2006 2:26:57 PM , Rating: 2
100GB in 1991? I believe I am using 40MB HD back in 1991.


RE: Reliability issues?
By mpc7488 on 8/9/2006 2:49:47 PM , Rating: 2
quote:
you know how the story goes with Sony reliability and quality.


Yes, I'm pretty familiar with it - it sucks royally. I'm glad your experience was otherwise.


RE: Reliability issues?
By oneils on 8/9/2006 4:30:02 PM , Rating: 2
You must mean: since 2001.

Hard drives were puny in 91. Hell, back in '92, I don't even know if my friend's 386 had an hd over 25 MB (I did not have a computer at the time).


RE: Reliability issues?
By SunAngel on 8/10/06, Rating: -1
RE: Reliability issues?
By dice1111 on 8/9/2006 2:08:48 PM , Rating: 2
I had a 300GB 7200.9 that died a day after I had transfered all my back ups to it. Tell me about convenience. I got a new one RMA'd from seagate themselves. So far so good, however I don't use it too often.


RE: Reliability issues?
By chusteczka on 8/9/2006 2:48:23 PM , Rating: 2
Hard drives typically fail for one of two main issues; either electrical power or overheating. For overheating, ensure air is flowing directly over the hard drives. For a power issue, either replace your power supply for a better brand with more power or (inclusive) obtain a battery backup with Automatic Voltage Regulation (AVR) and power conditioning.

It could be a common factor in both machines since four failed hard drives among a relatively small sample are not highly probable to be shipped from a hard drive manufacturer. Please start a thread in the forum category Technical Support for further assistance.


RE: Reliability issues?
By mindless1 on 8/9/2006 4:48:27 PM , Rating: 2
Heat and/or power can kill them but there are plenty of cases where it was another cause like handling or general defect.

I have QUITE a few drives in fileservers and the last 2 to fail, did so in a few months while the roughly 14 remaining in these 2 systems they were in have no signs of problems. IE- other drives tend to run for 2 years, are swapped out and contiune working fine when that happens.

Certainly not heat or power, some of the other drives working fine in same 2 sysetms are even the same models. (which in this case were a Samsung 160GB and Seagate ?GB).


RE: Reliability issues?
By mindless1 on 8/9/2006 4:50:07 PM , Rating: 2
What I wrote above could be misconstrued. The other drives ran for 2 years before their scheduled replacement, not any other reason (except capacity upgrades, too).


RE: Reliability issues?
By slashdotcomma on 8/10/2006 9:46:56 AM , Rating: 2
Hmmm... I highly doubt it. All of them were running behind a 120 mm fan at 12v with an ambient temperature of about 70F. Not to mention both pc's were using seasonic power supplies (tornado and a s12) on APC battery backup. They weren't all bought at once, 2 OEM from buy.com, and 2 retail from outpost spaced a couple weeks apart.


RE: Reliability issues?
By hstewarth on 8/9/2006 2:49:51 PM , Rating: 2
I have several 300G's from Seagate and none have failed yet. I have very good success with Seagate drive. However I had Western Digital drive recently failed.


RE: Reliability issues?
By lemonadesoda on 8/9/2006 6:08:22 PM , Rating: 2
I thought I had a Seagate fail. SMART errors showing up. Occasional system hangs. Turned out that the "nearly new" IDE cable was the problem. New cable. No problems with HDD. Otherwise I have had 100% reliability with seagates.

However, my Seagates get hot when put to task. One drive has SMART showing temperature max of 64 degrees C. This was from 10 minutes work doing some file copying. Pretty scarey stuff.


Heh....
By Souka on 8/9/2006 1:33:57 PM , Rating: 4
" Seagate Secretly Refreshes 7200.9 Desktop Drives"

Some secret......






RE: Heh....
By dice1111 on 8/9/2006 2:09:22 PM , Rating: 2
It was a secret. The drives have already shipped. This is the anouncment about what had transpired, and that you should be able to pick up your drive soon.


RE: Heh....
By hstewarth on 8/9/2006 2:48:03 PM , Rating: 2
Its pretty simple why they did this - the 7200.10 have larger space and they updated the drives in lower compacitys because of technical advances.


By AkaiRo on 8/9/2006 4:05:23 PM , Rating: 2
Saw a presentation from one of the tier 1 server manufacturers that included the words "Low Profile 3.5" and when asked about it they said that several manufacturers are going to be supplying them with drives in SAS (not SAS SFF), and SATA versions.


RE: Heh....
By mindless1 on 8/9/2006 5:01:13 PM , Rating: 3
I don't know that technical advances had anything to do with it, what advances did they need? Maxtor for one had been shipping shorter drives a few years ago as did Seagate even further back.

For example their 1GB ST51080A,
http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/ata/st51080a.h...
while it looks full *half* height from the linked illustration I happen to have one in front of me and it's got the inverted PCB and only 18mm thick. The Maxtors were also around 18mm thick so this "new" 20mm thick is actually quite thick for a downsized 1-platter-per-drive, format. Perhaps they have plans to later put a second platter in?


who knows what they are buying?
By kevinkreiser on 8/9/2006 1:05:01 PM , Rating: 2
this is very cool. the problem is though, that if you are like most people, you buy harddrives online from places like newegg. doing that is nice and convenient (and usually cheaper) but you never know which revision of the product you're going to get.




By jmunjr on 8/9/2006 3:42:05 PM , Rating: 2
That is NewEgg's problem. In all likelihood the model will remain the same 7200.9 etc, but the part number will change.
If NewEgg does not show the part # then shame on them.


By Doormat on 8/9/2006 4:13:51 PM , Rating: 2
You shouldnt be buying HDs from newegg anyways. Their HD shipping practices suck - an air pack or bubble wrap around the HD is not sufficient - neither is peanuts (go read HD manufacturer guidelines when you ship a HD). ZZF has a far better way to ship them.


Seagate has refreshed 7200.9 before
By tomoyo on 8/10/2006 2:47:21 AM , Rating: 2
Just to note, Seagate has already refreshed the 7200.9 internally at least once. There used to be some 7200.9 with a higher number of platters, such as the 300GB used 3 platters. Now it uses only 2 platters which seem to be 166GB shortstroked. I've run benchmarks which prove the much higher sequential rate caused by higher density platters. I wonder if some of these new improvements on their final non-perpendicular drives were related to the Maxtor acquisition as well.




By IceTron on 8/10/2006 5:12:04 AM , Rating: 1
Maxtors reliablity curse better not taint Seagates drives or im gonna be pissed.


By DLeRium on 8/10/2006 3:43:00 PM , Rating: 2
So if it's 166GB platters shortstroked, does it make the 7200.9 320gb as fast as the 7200.10? What other differences are there between the 2 drives still? They both have 16mb cache versions..


By LCC2286 on 8/9/2006 5:14:04 PM , Rating: 4
We've been getting these updated 7200.9s for well over 3 weeks now. We only stock 80 and 200+ , no real point for the "in between" sizes. Obviously these new ones are single platter....they're very thin like those older Maxtors. If anybody is intrested this is what it says on the sticker:
Model# ST380811AS
Part# 9CC131-302
Firmware# 3.AAE

We have both IDE and SATA version of the 80GB but so far the SATA ones are the updated ones.




Subject
By Howard on 8/9/2006 11:04:30 PM , Rating: 2
There's a chip on the PCB of the 7200.9 that gets really hot. If that's what they're referring to when they say PCMA... I'm not entirely sure if putting it on the other side of the PCB is a good idea.




RE: Subject
By rklaver on 8/10/2006 12:35:53 AM , Rating: 2
I think they mean the circuit board on the bottom of the hard drive has been flipped around so you don't see the chips and circuits anymore.


Sweet!
By RunLikeHell on 8/9/2006 12:59:59 PM , Rating: 2
5 year warranty, updated chassis...if they make a 300GB I'm in.




The new Mac Pros have them (?)
By vailr on 8/9/2006 6:36:31 PM , Rating: 2
The New Intel Mac Pros have them (photo here):
http://www.powermax.com/articles_reviews/article.p...
The Seagate 250 GB HD:
http://powermax.download-files.net/macpro2/drive.j...




Noise reduction? interesting...
By geekfool on 8/9/2006 6:41:37 PM , Rating: 2
Although I still like their ok performance and reliability (never had a problem that could not fall into the "bathtub failures", unlike some Maxtor's in the past...), I HATE their newest drives noise signature while seeking.

Being used to a previous Barracuda7 PATA drive, which probably was the quietest at the time of purchase, I can't stand the 7200.9 noises (terribly similar to the ZIP's click-of-death...).

That's why I'm considering WD or Samsung for next purchase, since the PC is indeed a "desktop".




Platter Size
By KorruptioN on 8/9/2006 9:27:16 PM , Rating: 2
I wonder if the platter size is unchanged, especially in the 80GB and 160GB units. Both those drives feature only one platter (in the previous revision at least), which is nice for noise and heat output.




Already shipping
By rklaver on 8/9/2006 11:42:30 PM , Rating: 2
I think these are already shipping. I just bought the now old Seagate drive and then noticed there was a newer version on Newegg that supported perpendicular recording.




Damm it
By Serifan on 8/10/2006 12:15:26 AM , Rating: 2
I just happened to buy one of theses drives like 4 days ago.




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