Better Than Velociraptor Speed for About Half the Price

[Markel]

This is pretty cool. This article shows how to modify a 1.5GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31500341AS to turn it into a 300GB drive that outperforms a 300GB Velociraptor in almost every category. Seeing that the Seagate drive goes for about $120 and the Velociraptor goes for around $230, it's not such a bad deal losing 1.2GB of capacity. And if you want to sacrifice a bit of that speed (and still beat the Velociraptor) you can make it into an 819GB drive. Pretty interesting.

http://www.techwarelabs.com/seagate_1-5tb-mod/

[johnnymk]

Unfortunately, the 7200.11 series drives are unreliable.

[InfiniteNothing]

This is pretty cool. This article shows how to modify a 1.5GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31500341AS to turn it into a 300GB drive that outperforms a 300GB Velociraptor in almost every category. Seeing that the Seagate drive goes for about $120 and the Velociraptor goes for around $230, it's not such a bad deal losing 1.2GB of capacity. And if you want to sacrifice a bit of that speed (and still beat the Velociraptor) you can make it into an 819GB drive. Pretty interesting.

http://www.techwarelabs.com/seagate_1-5tb-mod/
Good ol' partition the drive trick (essentially)

[GraingerGuy]

Unfortunately, the 7200.11 series drives are unreliable.

Thought they solved that with a firmware update?

[Jeffbx]

Did anyone benchmark it, tho? I can see the theory behind it, but I want to see how much it actually improves the speed.

[johnnymk]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148337

26% of buyers rate it only "1", and some of those buyers bought them recently. That's too high of a gamble for me, especially possibly losing a ton of data on such a large drive.

[Markel]

Did anyone benchmark it, tho? I can see the theory behind it, but I want to see how much it actually improves the speed.
The article I linked has benchmarks. And this trick is a bit more than "partition the drive" - it's "limit the drive size so it only uses the fastest part of the platters".

[Jeffbx]

Oh duh - I see them. Helps when you turn the page.

I'm going to have to pick up one of these & give this a try. Johnny has a valid point tho - these have terribily high failure rates. Hopefully the newer ones will be more stable?

[Markel]

I'm going to have to pick up one of these & give this a try. Johnny has a valid point tho - these have terribily high failure rates. Hopefully the newer ones will be more stable?
I've read that they have some firmware upgrades that are supposed to address the issues.

[johnnymk]

There has got to be a reason that incredible deals for the 7200.11 drives are all over the web. Dell had a deal last week...2 for $199, that's ridiculously cheap. It appears that Seagate is doing any and all things to dump these drives to unsuspecting buyers.