Modifying the Seagate 1.5TB Hard Drive: Unleash the Hidden Performance Within
Introduction
As many of you know, recently Seagate released one of the largest consumer drives on the market: the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31500341AS . The drive’s capacity is 1.5 TB (1500 GB) or approximately 1.397 TB. The drive specifications are decent and Seagate itself announced that this drive will be able to handle 120 MB/sec sustained transfer rate. All of us know that these rates will not be across the whole drive and were most likely obtained under the best possible conditions. That being said, we still can not overlook the fact that a 1.5 TB drive’s speeds place it directly in the Velociraptor territory. After discovering this astonishing speeds people normally bust out their Western Digital Velociraptor drives and start benchmarking them for comparison. So, what do they get? Velociraptor obviously wins in all categories – max speed, min speed, average speed, access time, you name it and it wins it. At this point they label the Seagate drive as second best and close the case. Of course thats the point, the Seagate drive was not meant to compete with the Velociraptor which is a performance drive and is instead targeted towards good performance and high storage capacity. So end of story right? . . . What if I told you there was a way to modify the 1.5TB Seagate to unleash the hidden beast within. . .
I decided to take the matters a step further. The WD Velociraptor is the largest “Raptor” class drive available on the market with the capacity of 300 GB. Despite the fact that it is the largest out of the lot, you still have a 300 GB drive compete against a drive that is basically five times its size. Normally, the giant will not stand a fighting chance, (look up David and Goliath if you don’t believe me) so I decided to even the fight out a little. What kind of speeds would you get if you were to take the large drive and downsize to the size of the Velociraptor? I decided to find out.
Prep for Surgery
Though really in this case we are not going to open up the drive, flash the firmware, or do cutting of any kind.
What we did to the 1.5 TB hard drive was to shrink it. There are a 5 easy steps you have to follow in order to accomplish that.
1. Download SeaTools DOS version from the Seagate website.
2. Burn the ISO onto a blank CD using any standard CD burner.
3. Put the burned CD into the CD-Drive and restart your computer.
4. The CD will boot automatically into the software’s graphical interface at which point you must click “ACCEPT” to the licence agreement.
5. Click the drive labeled “ST31500341AS” by left clicking the name.
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6. Go to the “Advanced Tools” tab and select the “Set Capacity Manually” option.
7. Once you have done that, a blank dialog should appear. Enter the amount of LBAs (Logical Block Addresses) you want your “new” drive to have and click “Continue”. The magic number for the 300 GB mark is 589080586. For reference the max number that you can enter into this field is 2930277167 which equals 1500.302 GB.
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8. The confirmation message should look like the screenshot below. Once you achieved the confirmation, you are done. You can take out the CD and press the reset button or click “CTRL + ALT + DEL” to restart your computer.
**Note: The “Set Capacity Manually” only accepts LBA number so if you put something like “300 GB”, the software will set the size to zero and you will have to shut down the computer, restart and put the correct number into the Box. Also, after the capacity has been set, the software can not alter the size unless you completely Shut Down your computer, a simple Reset will not work.
After you set the size less than the maximum capacity, the remaining space will be invisible to the system and thus rendered useless. (If you downsize the 1500 GB drive to 300 GB, the other 1200 GB would be invisible) The drive will effectively become 300 GB in size.
Now I can hear you all screaming “What happened to 1.2TB worth of my drive space?” As I mentioned the drive is now a 300GB drive for all purposes. Look at it this way, the 300GB Western Digital Velociraptor is approximately ~$229 while the price of the Seagate 1.5TB drive is approximately ~$119 at the time of this writing. Now what you end up with is a drive that is higher in performance in all regards except seek times at a lower cost per GB. We are all about getting more for less around here. The added benefit is that you can always go back and reclaim that 1.2TB at any time, try to expand the Velociraptor at a later date (good luck).
Now what did I tell you Kalkzone about going off your meds? You know how you get. Anyone here care to translate?
To address some of the comments on the article. The HDD writes from the inside out just like CDs and DVDs. When windows assigns drive partitions, it does so dynamically so it does not guarantee that the LBAs are going to be sequential or on the inside of the drive. By cutting up the drive on the firmware level the LBAs pertaining to the outside of the drive are invisible so Windows will not be able to even see them. The access time plays a role in the speeds for accessing 4k parts throughout the drive which Seagate performed better in reading but not in writing.
Some people asked if this could be done with other Seagate drives and what was the reason that I chose the 1.5 Tb instead of any other drive. The reason is this: the larger the drive the better the performance boost so buying a 300 GB Seagate drive will not equate in performance to using 1/5 of the 1.5 Tb drive.
Raiding the drives will make the throughput larger, however, it will not have a significant impact on the access times. The answer to the question that was brought up about gamepla is this: since Seagate does 4k reads faster than the Velociraptor anyway, Seagate will perform better in a 1 GB space trying to find and read 4k packets of game code.
Wrong. HDDs write from the outside in, so that the highest performance will be at the beginning of the drive. Using normal partitioning tools to just create a 300GB partition at the beginning of the drive will achieve the same effect, with lower risk than the SeaTools.
You could effectively do the same thing easier and still have access to the full 1.5TB of space. Its called partitioning the drive. Make one partition 300Gig, or even smaller and the second partition the rest of the drive. Wahla. Still have a fast portion of the drive and slower storage portion of the drive.
Better yet, buy 2x 640GB or 1TB WD Black drives. Do a Raid 0 or Matrix Raid 0 the first part of the drive for 300Gig and the back half make into a Raid 0 or 1 (what ever you want). There for the price of a WR you get vast amount of storage and sequential reads/writes, since your focusing on that, that will crush it.
Access times are one of the most important things of the drive. Its just like saying well yes your saving ~$100 but I could as well get a $300 SSD drive that has basically zero access time and it would whip both of those drives, yet space is still an issue. Access time is everything since really that is what is holding up your PC 99% of the time.
Could not agree more with Deathman20 – I did the same on 2x320GB drives – 1 x 100GB RAID1 partition (pretty speedy) for the OS and 1 x 200 x 2 Gb RAID0 partition for temporary stuff (and that was 2 years ago).
THG did a very similar test comparing a well partitioned enterprise class drive (a 15k from hitach I bevlieve) against some SSD.
Using the “outside” portion of the disk (highest linear velocity) practically makes sure that one stays in the “high throughput area’.
Limiting the partition size means that the disk’s r/w heads will use short strokes even for random accesses.
Look that up, THG explains this better than I did.
What if you created a 1200 GB partition and a 300 GB partitions then only used the 300 GB partition? This assumes the first partition is placed on the outside of the disk spindle.
You still don’t have 10k RPM’s. Your performance will be nowhere near the Velociraptor.
Except that the Seagate drive has a higher data density in bits/sq.in. Also, at 1.5tb, only a small sliver of the three platters is then used for storage. This is why in linear throughput it easily beats the WD, and why it can keep up fairly well even at 7200rpm.
This has a term – “short stroking” – and it isn’t new.
Partitioning doesn’t necessarily help because accesses to the second partition will slow down access to the main partition. Defining only one partition and leaving the rest of the space unpartitioned should work the same, but it is far less tempting to use that space when the drive simply reports it doesn’t exist.
For what it’s worth, the Seagate is probably louder…
You also make 2 serious mistakes in the article :
1. The most important thing for an OS drive is random access (small 4k reads and writes). NOT sequential access. This is the reason why SSDs are so much faster. They’re not significantly faster at sequential transferms, but they kill the HDDs in random transfers.
2. It’s the OUTER part of the disk that is fastest NOT the inner.
To the folks suggesting that the rest of the drive be partitioned away from the “fast bit” near the spindle:
I can understand why you’d advocate this path. Getting a drive this huge, and then telling it to ignore all but a small fraction–it’s a bit painful.
However, allocating the remaining space as a “data” partition is actually counter-productive. With that scenario, you’re telling the read heads to ping-pong back and forth between the two segments of the drive, between the bit that has the OS/programs and the bit that has your mp3s, movies, pr0n, etc.
If you can only afford to get one drive–don’t do this. Use the full capacity as normal, and enjoy the solid performance it gives. This hack is for people who want a high-performance drive for data that gets touched frequently, but don’t necessarily want to shell out the $$$ for a Velo.
Is it as good as a Velo? No.
Is it better than your average 7.2k RPM disk? Hell yeah.
I would class this with overclocking a system’s CPU, RAM, GPU, and other essentials. It’s a way to trade a bit of longevity–or in this case, roominess–for more speed. As with any such hack, Your Mileage May Vary.
oh my god…this is totally stupid… you can achieve the same result by partitioning the HD to 300GB/1200GB. The outer clusters on a HD is always faster due to faster linear speed.
BUT a velociraptor will be always much faster due to faster rotation speed (10.000rpm)
Sakis, remember that the density of the 7200rpm is higher than the 10,000rpm, so its not always going to be true that a 10,000rpm drive will be faster.
eg…Faster speed – larger distance to travel
Slower speed – shorter distance to travel
Any coincidence that Seagate released an updated version of its Seatools just today ????
Looks like they don’t like you to have a faster harddrive (xcept you pay extra for it of course)
stupid, its called short stroking a hdd(does not work on ssd)
same thing can be down by partition the hdd into 2 zones.
first zone fast) 2nd zone what left-speed wise)
all you have to do is find wher the hdd starts to low down, using hdtach.. then parition it no biger that the start on when it slows down. workin in raid too.
ie my 4x vr300 all 1 volumn raid 0 (i get 440mb/sec.
but if i partition it(or make a small volumn of 120g(30g per drive top speed inner tracks) i get 510mb/sec
http://forums.extremeoverclocking.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=136794&stc=1&d=1247861607
my 1.5 is showing a slowdown at 800gbytes…
but on the intel x48 is showd a slowdown at 500gb
(its on a sil 3132 + 5 port multiplyer external box) sil caped at 95mb/sec per port)
not a true speed of hdd, but you het the idea
short stroke your drive.. done lose the space partition it, then try hdtach 3.xx