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).
I propose a follow-up test, comparing short stroking using limited LBAs, small partition and small+large partition. Too many arguments here left ub-proved!
Absolutely fantastic. Thanks for that but would you think the same thing will work on a 1 TB hard drive knowing that 1 & 1.5TB has very similar specs?
Now this is really tempting me. Not only do you have more money saved compared with the pricing of a Velociraptor, but with that spare change you could buy another Seagate 1.5tb drive, do this mod to both HDDs and put them in RAID 0 :O.
What is the magic LBA number for 500GB. I want to get 4 of these drives for quad Raid 0
If this is just using the start of the disc there is a much simpler way to do this.
Create your partitions at the start of the disc – you can leave a big partition on the rest of the disc as well – just use the start of the disc for your high perf work, and use the other partition for those archives/backups you don’t touch much.
If what Dave Gilbert is proposing is correct, can you in fact, partition the one 1.5tb drive in to many small 300gb drives but get ‘velociraptor’ speeds for each partition? Can we update this article with results from testing this theory? is testing this not a worth while follow up?
The multiple 300GB partitions won’t work. The reason you get the speed is that you are using the outer cylinders where the data is it’s densest, ie more data per cylinder. The other 300GB partitions would get progressively slower as you get near the center of the platter.
The small+large partition would work if you keep only rarely accessed data there.
You can partition the drive (any drive) in multiple partitions and use the outer partition as a high performance partition. Then use the inner partition as a storage partition. Normally, the cyls at the outer edge of the disk have ~ 2X MB/Sec of the inside cyls.
Also, consider using a series of smaller partitions as you minimize the number of cyls you travel during a seek (the slowest activity in a drive).
Tom S.
You would need to be very careful about what you put on the other partition though. Once you start reading files from both partitions at the same time the performance gains would go out the window.
Could this work by using Intel’s Matrix technology to allocate the first 300MB of a set of Barracuda drives configured as RAID 0, then allocating the remaining 1.2TB in a RAID 5 array? Theoretically we would have a high-performance system disk and a fail-safe large capacity data disk.
Thoughts please.
On a HD access time to data is a composite of 2 times, track to track AND rotational speed,
ie. if you have zero track to track time you still have to wait 1/2 rotation (average) before you
arrive on the desired data, so you cannot neglect the diff of 72000 rpm and 10 or 15k rpm
The higher bit density on the big drives gives higher data rate, on 1.5TB you get up to 120 MB/s !
but only on long seq. read/writes, good for the large file stuff like “entertainment” (you know what I mean)
If you’re on a tight budget, it is a very good idea to partition
your OS on the outher tracks, it will boost your boot time as well
and then have a read mostly data partition on the rest of the disk.
If you have 2 drives, why not put the swap on a small partition on the outer edge
of the other disk, bet it will speed your boot time even more
This is very interesting. But is there a setting to make the Seagate as reliable as the Velociraptor?
Wouldn’t the same idea be achieved, like others have mentioned, by:
1) Making a performance partition and a storage partition
2) Usiong software like DiskTrix Ultimate Defrag to put all ‘performance’ data at the beginning of the drive, and all storage or archive data at teh end?
I don’t see the benefit to disabling 80% of the drive.
Thanks for posting about this, I would like to read more about this topic.
i thing this is not true [img]http://www.techwarelabs.com/wp-content/gallery/seagate-1.5tb-hdd-mod/hddmod_seatools_03.JPG[/img]
according the log:
max native address is LBA 2930277167 and this is used…
Very enjoyed this! Well done!