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Seagate's New Barracuda 3TB (ST3000DM001) Reviewby Anand Lal Shimpi on 11/2/2011 11:00 PM EST
77 Comments
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jwcalla - Wednesday, November 02, 2011 - linkI'll remember this review when I go to build my NAS next year.
Since SSDs have a hook in me, I no longer put any consideration into performance of high-capacity drives. The only things I'm looking for in them are low power, low heat, and low noise. For the most part they spend their time idle and any time I need them it's to access items that have no need for high throughput (e.g., media and backup). But... that's just me and I'm just a single person. Reply
Locut0s - Thursday, November 03, 2011 - linkI don't think that's just you. I think that's really the usage paradigm we are seeing the whole industry move towards. SSDs for the OS and a few apps, HUGE efficient low power drives for all your other stuff. Given this I'm not sure it was a smart move for Seagate to abandon their 5900s. I can tell you the next few drives I'm going to be buying will almost certainly be more WD 2TB Greens, if the prices ever go back down again. Reply
bznotins - Thursday, November 03, 2011 - linkDefinitely agree here. My focus on platters is now power consumption, size, and reliability. If speed is necessary, I go with the SSD.
I'm starting to bump up against the end of my 4x2TB JBOD and will likely need to start swapping-in 3-4TB drives soon. I'll be largely ignoring speed when I do so.
Perhaps reviews can focus more on these elements (power/reliability) over time (understanding the latter is a tough one)? Reply
Samus - Thursday, November 03, 2011 - linkGreat article Anand. Glad to see AT reviewing internal HDD's again (it seems to have been forever as the modern focus is obviously on SSD's)
Statistically, the ideal operating temperature for HDD's is between 35-45c, and while Green drives operate <=35c, they still seem to be more reliable in the end; I've never had one fail, where as I've had two 7200.11 drives and a WD 1TB Black fail in the last two-three years, all from SMART sector allocation errors.
I think Seagate is making a mistake giving an entire market to WD. I don't think Hitachi or Samsung make 'green drives' (they might, I'm just not familiar with them) so WD is going to have this market cornered, and I believe thats a big market, especially for external drives where the low temperatures and power especially make sense. Reply
futurepastnow - Friday, November 04, 2011 - linkI agree so much, I moved all of my high-capacity storage drives to a separate, dedicated computer.
There's just something very... freeing... about having an appliance-like network storage. It backs up all of my computers (and itself) at night. I don't have to think about what movies and pictures are on which machine.
Slow, low-power drives and a slow, low-power CPU? No problem. Reply
Techrev - Friday, July 05, 2013 - linkI've gone with an 8 bay external eSata case. I love the hell out of it, so I'm using my HTPC as a file server now, but the drives aren't clogging up the case and have their own power. I thought about going NAS, but I wanted the high speed Sata connection for my game pc. Even still, interface aside, big low power drives still make more sense to me. Using my HTPC in this way seems to be the best and most efficient, but if a NAS ever seems to make more sense, I'll just grab an ITX mb and case and build a small PC to connect to the 8 Bay instead... Reply
gevorg - Wednesday, November 02, 2011 - linkThe 2TB version looks like a price sweet spot. My only concern with these new drives is their 2 year warranty, which doesn't even match Western Digital's 3 years on the Green drives, let alone 5 years on the Black drives. Still, time will tell, should see first reliability reports in a few months. Reply
jigglywiggly - Thursday, November 03, 2011 - linkI thought these drives were going to come with 4gb nands or is that something else? I would buy it then as an OS drive for a diff pc.
Also amazing time to release new hd with prices super amazingly low to azn flooding. Reply
Rand - Thursday, November 03, 2011 - linkThat's the upcoming Barracuda XT. Reply
misaki - Thursday, November 03, 2011 - linkPersonally, I want reliability, reliability, reliability. Performance is pretty much irrelevant these days just by sticking in a single SSD for your OS and apps. However, I feel that drive quality has dropped significantly ever since we went over 1TB a few years ago and now I'm always on the lookout for when the next drive is about to fail. This is across Seagate, WD and Hitachi, including WD's Black line.
I've had the most success with Samsung in the past 2 years or so, but now that they have sold their HD division to Seagate, I don't know who I can trust. I hope that now that Seagate and WD are the only 2 makers left, that they will bring up their standards, but I'm not holding my breath. Reply
TrackSmart - Thursday, November 03, 2011 - linkAgreed (times 3). Some of these 4+ platter HDDs have absurdly high failure rates! Totally unacceptable. I wonder if reliability is one of the reasons for reducing the platter count on these larger drives by using 1 GB platters. If that's the case, I'm all for it.
SSD for speed. HDD for file storage and backup - and it had better be reliable because we know it won't be fast. Reply
Snotling - Thursday, November 03, 2011 - linkDon't bet on reliability from a lower end product. History tells us that older technology is not worked on to make it more reliable, only cheaper and those so called GREEN drives are targeted at the low cost customer who in the minds of the marketing geniuses deserve to have something that breaks early and breaks often.
Super high-end performance may not have the maturity to be reliable but lower performance products are usually even worst. Reliability is found in the "enterprise class" which usually performs on the level of upper-mid-range to middle-high end. There is a reason for that, these parts are not prototypes anymore and they are not made of components rejected for manufacturing better products.
They're the real deal. Reply
Sivar - Friday, November 04, 2011 - linkI agree regarding Samsung drives.
Anecdotes are not data and all that, but Samsung is the one drive brand I've not had fail. I'm not talking about sample sizes of 2 or 3 -- I have 9 of just their 2TB F4 in my home server right now. I've worked with and owned over 400 hard drives.
I think I know my hard drives. I've set up six large storage servers; 2 for enterprise. I was the first moderator on StorageReview's forums, edited Eugene Ra's articles before publication, made friends with three hard drive engineers through many discussions. One of the other more prevalent users of that site owned Red Hill Computers in Australia. Since starting that company in the early 90's, only one Samsung drive was ever returned to him as defective, and that one had visible dents and was from a customer that wanted a refund and not a replacement. He suspected the customer damaged the drive intentionally to get some quick cash. Whether true or not, one return in several decades is notable.
I wouldn't touch Samsung's phones or televisions, but their hard drives are rock solid. Reply
Locut0s - Thursday, November 03, 2011 - linkCause the terrible mess that the HD market is in due to to the Thai flooding has even the old Barracuda Green 2TB selling for north of $220 on NewEgg right now!! And even at the low end I haven't seen it much lower than about $170-180. I can remember selling these drives for $70 or less only a few months ago when I was working computer retail. Reply
radium69 - Thursday, November 03, 2011 - linkJust build a pontoon under that damn factory in Thailand.
Prices are going through the bloody roof.
Bought a 160gb WD a month ago for 38 euro.
Looked at their website now and it 79 euro.
Jeebus, more than 200% increase in price.
For that price I can buy extra ram.
There is no excuse for such a bloody increase in price. Reply
mcturkey - Thursday, November 03, 2011 - linkYou're right. The fact that the company making 75% of all hard drive motors for the entire industry is currently unable to produce anything is no excuse for prices skyrocketing. The fact that every computer manufacturer has purchased as much stock as they can to ensure they can still sell PCs is no excuse for prices skyrocketing. The fact that even once the flood waters fully recede, it will take 6-8 months for everything to come back online 100% is no excuse for prices skyrocketing. The fact that once we're back at 100% production, early drive production runs may be questionable due to downtime, inconsistent machine performance, etc is no excuse for prices skyrocketing.
Seriously? I am so tired of seeing people say that the price jump is gouging. The limited supply of drives that retailers have are being sold at these prices, because those who absolutely need the storage are willing to pay it. I am willing to bet that unless a miracle happens, you won't be able to buy mechanical drives at all from most retailers for awhile next year. The limited amount of production that does exist will be snapped up by the PC makers to keep them afloat. Reply
marvdmartian - Thursday, November 03, 2011 - linkAnd yet, how foolish is it of any company (or companies), to depend on getting 75% of ANY part required for their product, solely from one area of the world, which is known for having a monsoon season (and subsequent flooding)??
While this year's flooding in Thailand is much worse than previous years have seen (the "hundred year flood" concept), it's still awfully foolish of these companies not to have spread their suppliers around. I'm sure there are factories in India and China that would have happily taken on part of the load in the past, thus negating this shortage, and minimizing it's impact.
In the meantime, as has been pointed out already, this might be a foolish decision, by Seagate, to trade cost for performance. Again, as already stated, reliability is much more important of a consideration, and I'd rather be stuck with a 5900rpm drive with a 3 to 5 year warranty, than a 7200 rpm drive with a 2 year warranty, especially if it's just going to be a storage drive.
Time will tell, how good of a decision this will be for Seagate. Reply
name99 - Thursday, November 03, 2011 - link"And yet, how foolish is it of any company (or companies), to depend on getting 75% of ANY part"
Gee, it's like relying on a vital commodity (call it "oil") most of which comes from countries with unstable governments that could, at any time, collapse into war or revolution...
As long as you have a system (political and financial) that rewards people (CEOs and politicians) purely on short-term results, this is the way the world will work. Reply
JackNSally - Thursday, November 03, 2011 - link"most of which comes from countries with unstable governments that could, at any time, collapse into war or revolution..."
So Canada and Mexico are unstable and at any time is about to collapse into war or revolution? (well, Mexico has it's problems with the drug cartels but that's mainly near the border)
ftp://ftp.eia.doe.gov/pub/oil_gas/petroleum/data_p... Reply
name99 - Friday, November 04, 2011 - linkDon't be a retard. OIl is a fungible commodity.
You think if Iran or Saudi Arabia stop exporting oil it won't affect the US? Reply
Jaybus - Friday, November 04, 2011 - linkThis is normal for any aging technology. These motors are not used in anything else. The market for these motors is not expected to increase, ever, and will almost certainly decrease in the not too distant future. Nobody is going to start up a company to make hard drive motors, therefore there is only one major supplier and a handful of smaller suppliers that could not produce enough on their own. It will become more and more a niche market, just like cathode-ray tube suppliers. It's not that there won't be demand for some time to come, but rather that the demand will never again grow. There is no more room for growth in the hard drive market in general, so not much incentive for new suppliers, or for current suppliers to expand. Reply
BlazeEVGA - Thursday, November 03, 2011 - linkI think you meant to say, more than a 2x increase in price - which translates to a 100%+ increase in price.
That said, the hard drive industry is a hard-pressed commodity industry (you can blame the OEMs for the drive the price into the ground nonsense...) that has been looking for an excuse to shake up historical tpricing rends. I agree with most that these supply/demand price drivers are actually gouging but the on the flip-side, storage has been almost TOO crazy cheap for far too long. Just think how much tech (layers) go into storage, how much realibility is expected to perserve data & deliver performance and then compare that to how much you pay for an iPod, iPwn or HDMI cable and ask yourself - what gives? Reply
BlazeEVGA - Thursday, November 03, 2011 - linkThat said, the hard drive industry is a hard-pressed commodity industry (you can blame the OEMs for the drive the price into the ground nonsense...) that has been looking for an excuse to shake up historical pricing trends. I agree with most that these supply/demand price drivers are actually gouging but the on the flip-side, storage has been almost TOO crazy cheap for far too long. Just think how much tech (layers) goes into storage, how much reliability is expected to perserve data & deliver performance and then compare that to how much you pay for an iPod, iPwn, HDMI cable or even your monthly phone bill and ask yourself - what gives? Reply
Phyltre - Thursday, November 03, 2011 - linkThe price has been multiplied by two, but you can't parse that into "more than a 2x increase in price" due to reading conventions. It will be read as "more than a two times increase in price," which taken literally means the same thing as a "200% increase." They both literally say "the price has been increased, by 200 percent" and "the price has been increased more than two times."
If a bottle costs, say, fifty dollars and the price undergoes a 200 percent price increase, the increase is 200 percent of the original cost. You then add the increase--the 200 percent of the original value-to the original cost. The original cost and the increase are separate numbers. Much simpler to say that the price has more than doubled, or it's now twice the previous cost. Reply
BlazeEVGA - Thursday, November 03, 2011 - linkSay what?
Prices on average have doubled since the flood.
That represents a 100% increase in price or 2x the base (original) price.
The key operative word here is "increase" - as used by the OC.
If people are buying at price levels increased by 200% - they are surely being gouged and making hasty purchasing decisions. Not saying there aren't channels pricing hard drives at that level, just saying that 2x (100% increase) is the typical trend. Reply
BlazeEVGA - Thursday, November 03, 2011 - linkThe rest of your explanation...no frikin clue. Reply
Grizzlebee - Friday, November 04, 2011 - linkI agree with what he's saying, although his wording could be better.
I, too, hate when people say something is 3x "faster" when it is really only 3x "as fast", which, of course, is only "2x faster". Reply
BlazeEVGA - Friday, November 04, 2011 - linkSay what? Reply
Grizzlebee - Friday, November 04, 2011 - link3x faster = 4x as fast
50% faster = 150% of original
I don't really know of a simpler way to say it. Reply
MamiyaOtaru - Monday, November 07, 2011 - link"3x faster = 4x as fast"
haha you are insane Reply
iwod - Thursday, November 03, 2011 - linkI always thought Low Power were selling really well. At least that is what's happening on WD's side.
And i am waiting for an 3,5" HDD that could be plugged into USB2.0 without addtional power supply. I dont mind being much slower ( USB 2.0 is only up to 38MB/s anyway ), I need something to backup and write slowly. Reply
Snotling - Thursday, November 03, 2011 - linkGet a 2.5 drive... you'll be better off as they have shock resistance built-in and they go up to 1TB .(backup disks are bound to be moved around so shock resistance is a must)
Need more than that and speed is not an issue?
cloud backup. more expensive, slower and heavy on bandwidth at first but so much better than anything else Reply
Mickatroid - Thursday, November 03, 2011 - linkHi Anand, is the effective sequential write power consumption (for example) of the XT comparitively better than the graphs indicate? I ask because of the higher number of MB the XT should write per second, in comparison to the Green, at its measured power consumption.
That is to say, the XT should be finished before the Green and the XT's power consumption should then be able to drop. An intersting power consumption metric might be Joules/MB written or read :)
Also, you would need three Greens spinning (at 2TB) v two XTs (at 3TB) to make up 6TB of storage. For someone with a larger storage needs this might be relevant. Again with metrics, I would be interested to see watts/TB at idle.
Love your work.
M Reply
Booster - Thursday, November 03, 2011 - linkI couldn't care less when Seagate releases their new 'drives'. I don't know how others are able to use that garbage, but each time I stumble upon recent Seagates (post 7200.10) they are either dead or dying as we speak, reallocating sectors etc. It's a miracle these products even make it to market since their reliabily is non-existant.
Flaky and unreliable and now with only 2 year warranty! And the 2 400 power on hours limit is ridiculous. It's even worse than IBM Deskstars being rated for only 8 hours a day.
Keep your drives, Seagate. Not interested. I'd rather wait for WD to rebuild it's factories rather than deal with you. Reply
Booster - Thursday, November 03, 2011 - linkYeah, check that fancy Seagate specs sheet, it clearly lists power on hours as 2 400 for all models! Now even Seagate itself admits their drives are garbage... ;) RIP Samsung HDD division, I'll cherish my 4 2TB HD204UIs and wait for WD to rebuild. Reply
Transmitthis14 - Thursday, November 03, 2011 - linkWhat limit?
Annualized Failure Rate (AFR) of 0.32% - Is based on a usage of 2400 power-on-hours a year.
If you use it more, then the chance of a failure increases over that estimate of .3
So use a drive for a year 24hours a day 8736hrs, would mean your MTTF is just over 1%. The longer you keep a drive the sooner it will die anyway.
As for reliability, well, I "Expect" any drive to fail at some point, and I always have a spare which is a clone of the one I'm using. Anything else is just asking for trouble.
Seagate drives are not any worse than other makes.
Warranty - if my drive fails within "5" years - I still contact them and ask for a replacement, as its well within my consumer rights here in the UK (reasonable length of time and all that)
But every one has a favorite supplier, just make sure you have a backup/clone or cloud to keep you stuff safe. :) Reply
IceDread - Thursday, November 03, 2011 - linkI agree.
However, the market could use some competition, thou competition from segate I do not see as a factor. Reply
Henry 3 Dogg - Thursday, August 30, 2012 - linkStrange.
Over the last 25 years I have owned hundreds of Seagate drives. That includes a single array 88 drives that I ran for a several years.
In all that time I think that I have only ever seen 4 Seagate drive failures, though I have thrown the odd other drive as a precautionary measure (SMART output, temperature, squeaks...)
On the other hand I have owned only 3 Western Digital drives. The first because I didn't know better, and the other two because I needed drives in a hurry and had to take what was there now.
Of those 3 drives, 2 failed within 6 months of purchase. The other, a 2T Green WD20EADS brings slow to a level that I would not have imagined possible in this day and age. Reply
IceDread - Thursday, November 03, 2011 - linkThere will be a lack of competition on the 5400 rm drivers that I love for storage. Performance and power wise segate could not compete with WD but still. Reply
tipoo - Thursday, November 03, 2011 - linkThe laptop oriented Momentus XT did so well in reviews I wonder why HDD manufacturers haven't imitated it. Even on desktops where you can have a dedicated SSD, a hybrid would do better in picking which files you access most, and do it automatically. Reply
name99 - Thursday, November 03, 2011 - link"The laptop oriented Momentus XT did so well in reviews I wonder why HDD manufacturers haven't imitated it."
Because it sucked in real life, as opposed to artificial tests. The algorithms it uses to decide what to store in the flash are garbage, so any sustained long reads from the drive (eg backups, playing music, playing a movie) remove all the useful stuff (OS files, apps) from the flash.
And since Seagate pissed in that well, giving hybrids a bad name, no-one else wants to take the risk that their drive won't sell because people aren't willing to gamble 50%+ extra dollars on the CHANCE that it might perform better.
Of course, the other thing this shows us is the fundamental stupidity of this industry. If they were willing to work on creating a set of benchmarks that accurately reflected real world usage (eg heavily weighted the cost of small delays for VM swapping and launching apps, took into account the extent to which data is ejected from the flash in a hybrid, etc) and could then point to those benchmarks as proving the value of their hybrids, people would be happy to pay the premium. But no, no-one wants a benchmark that shows the actual VALUE of their drives (as opposed to just tech specs) because they're all afraid they'll look bad --- better to be king of a dying industry than risk falling behind in a new industry. Reply
dagamer34 - Thursday, November 03, 2011 - linkBecause a 64GB SSD for $100 runs circles around it. And at $200 for 128GB, most people will learn to manage their bulky content on a separate drive (music, movies, etc...) Reply
AstroGuardian - Thursday, November 03, 2011 - linkI can see from the table that the drives have Power-On Hours on 2400.
Now i know that this parameter shows how long the electronics can be in power on state, but 2400 hours means 100 days.
I have desktop class disks that have stayed on for at least 3 years which is more than 1000 days with no problems. So this kinda looks too bad to be true.
Any explanation on this parameter and the stated amount of hours? Reply
Guspaz - Thursday, November 03, 2011 - linkIn this day and age of SSDs, is the speed of massive drives really important anymore? Consumers are more likely to either go with a smaller cheaper drive as their primary, or an SSD. Big drives like these tend to be used for bulk storage, where performance often isn't very relevant. This makes the Green drives, in my opinion, even more important.
The few watts of power might not seem like much, but when you've got 10 of them in a home file server, that saving adds up. Between the Barracuda 3TB and the Caviar Green 3TB, there's almost 3W at idle. So, 30W there. The startup power draw on the Green drives (how much power they take to spin up) is also much lower, which can make a big difference in sizing a power supply for a home file server. And of course, noise becomes a big concern too when you've got 10 drives... Reply
Snotling - Thursday, November 03, 2011 - linkstart up power... oh my. you realize that unless you use an Atom CPU, the power draw of 10 5400rpm HDs vs 10 7200rpm HDs will be ridiculously marginal at least at start up... I can't argue with runing 10 drives all day not making a difference but then, you should not rely on low end products for such a task since they just won't survive 24/7 activity.
also, these drives need to disappear completely because as long as they exist, some cheap ass OEM will use them as a boot drive on some all in one that is reviewed today on this very same website. And that my friend, is a crime against the consumer. Reply
Denithor - Thursday, November 03, 2011 - linkWhen are the hybrid drives expected to be out?
Why no 4TB or 5TB models if they now have 1TB platters? Reply
n0b0dykn0ws - Thursday, November 03, 2011 - linkWhen did you review the Barracuda XT 4 GB?
n0b0dykn0ws Reply
n0b0dykn0ws - Thursday, November 03, 2011 - linkErr. 4 TB, sorry.
n0b0dykn0ws Reply
Death666Angel - Thursday, November 03, 2011 - linkReview was of the external stuff:
:-) Reply
Marc HFR - Thursday, November 03, 2011 - linkDear Anand,
Can you provide us the avarage read and the write speed and read and write disk busy time under Light and Heavy AT Workload 2011 ?
Performance seems strange, it can be related to the very low performance of some HDD drive with very small write, like in this test :
http://www.hardware.fr/medias/photos_news/00/33/IM... Reply
Golgatha - Thursday, November 03, 2011 - link$179.99 MSRP
Just did a Google shopping search and they are $249.99 and up from there. Wow! Reply
Dug - Thursday, November 03, 2011 - linkAll hard drives are through the roof.
I checked Newegg for 1TB and couldn't believe it.
$130-$220 for 1TB?!?! Reply
dagamer34 - Thursday, November 03, 2011 - linkMy plans for buying 2 3TB Western Digital drives for $110 each on Black Friday have gone out the window.
And to think, I bought 2 3TB WD drives from MicroCenter for $120 each because I didn't want to pay the $10 extra per drive. STUPID. Reply
Death666Angel - Thursday, November 03, 2011 - linkBelow the power charts, you mention "5400RPM Barracuda Green". Seagate uses 5900RPM though, as you said throughout the test. :-)
Interesting stuff. Another con for 7200 should be their loudness compared to most 5400 drives. Reply
Snotling - Thursday, November 03, 2011 - linkthat's about 3db... unless you run 10 of them like that guy up ther in the comments, you won't notice.
ever since they introduced fluid dynamic bearings, the noise level of ALL hard drives has become a non issue. Reply
name99 - Thursday, November 03, 2011 - link
There is a segment that Seagate isn't considering as it decides to axe the Green line: the home server market. If you're doing mass archival to some external storage, random performance is likely not a big concern. Instead, all you want is cheap, low-power storage.
Is this a legitimate viewpoint?
Surely, for most home servers, the drive is not in use. So the OS can spin it down. If it's only spinning for an hour or less a day, then does the higher power it's using while spinning matter that much? Reply
haukionkannel - Thursday, November 03, 2011 - linkHmmm.. maybe they leave low power segment to Samsung harddisks? In my crystal ball I can see Samsung F5 coming, with very low power usage.... Reply
Nogib - Thursday, November 03, 2011 - link"The new 1TB platter drives all carry the M001 suffix to their model numbers."
B.S. Look at the chart. Clearly only the 1TB and 3TB models are using the 1TB platters given their listed heads/disks (6/3 on 3TB, 2/1 on 1TB). The 1.5TB appears to be using the slightly older 750GB platters (4 heads/2 disks) and the 2TB using even older 667GB platters (6 heads/3 disks). Reply
ggathagan - Thursday, November 03, 2011 - linkIf he had said "All of the drives with the M001 suffix are 1 TB platters", you would be correct to call B.S.
He did not say that, however. Reply
mattgmann - Thursday, November 03, 2011 - linkso these will be going for about a grand in a week or two right? At this point SSDs are almost on par with price/gb as hard drives. Reply
alphamm - Friday, November 04, 2011 - linkI browse through Seagate's official website, but can't find the MSRP.
AFAICT, this MSRP is absolutely unbelievable. How did you get it? Reply
Robert Kooijman - Friday, November 04, 2011 - linkFrom this review one can conclude the WD Caviar Green gives the best performance per Watt.
A few years ago I build an AMD 780G based HTPC that has 6 SATA and 3 USB WD Caviar Green drives. Both 1 and 2 TB units. Zero problems so far: everything runs very cool and quiet. 1080p playback no problem either.
So yes, Seagate's decision to abandon low RPM drives doesn't make sense. Reply
ikkaiteku - Friday, November 04, 2011 - linkIs Seagate using 4k sectors with their 1TB platters? Where I work, 512B vs 4KB sector size on drives makes a big difference in whether or not some machines will factory restore properly. Western Digital has been labeling *most*, but not all, of their Advanced Format drives, but Seagate is a big unknown. Reply
royalcrown - Saturday, November 05, 2011 - linkand see if it bricks... Reply
Booster - Sunday, November 06, 2011 - linkFreaken eh, LMAO! :D
Main reason I went with WD instead of Seagate - reliability. WD drives up to 1TB have been rock solid for me. 2TB Greens are kinda flaky though, that's why I chose Samsung HD204UIs for 2TB Green drives, they are quite good.
Now that Samsung is out of business and WD had sunken, seems like it's a win-win for Seagate, right? Not quite so. Seagate sucks so much noone in their right mind would even consider it. For instance, they release firmware updates for their bricks on a regular basis. Haven't seen a single update for a WD drive - ever. Reply
sduguid - Sunday, November 06, 2011 - linkI'm not sure where all of these comments about Seagate reliability are coming from. I suspect we're hearing from people who have used a few of them or have encountered a problem or two over time.
I've installed thousands of Seagate drives over the years (starting with the 40GB models) and have had only a handful of returns for failure (less than 5). In two of these failures, heat was to blame due to air circulation problems.
Some of the 7200.11 drives were a bit of a fiasco and required firmware updates to work properly but those issues seemed to be under only specific and rare circumstances.
My experience with Seagate has been that their drives perform well and, more importantly, have been absolutely rock solid.
I tend to not bother posting in comments sections but thought I would counter some of the disinformation with real-world experience.
Now, if I could just actually get some more drives on a timely basis but that's a different problem. :) Reply
Booster - Monday, November 07, 2011 - link"I've installed thousands of Seagate drives over the years (starting with the 40GB models) and have had only a handful of returns for failure (less than 5)."
You're kidding, right?
"Some of the 7200.11 drives were a bit of a fiasco and required firmware updates to work properly but those issues seemed to be under only specific and rare circumstances."
ALL of Seagate drives post 7200.10 are unreliable due to design change. 40GB 7200.7 and other drives of that era were rock solid, true. But they also had issues like oxydizing contacts IIRC.
Basically what Seagate did with 7200.11 and derivatives - they took a more advanced SCSI hard drive architecture and implemented it with low-grade consumer components. SCSI drives enjoy much higher quality heads, lower density platters to minimize read/write errors whereas consumer drives have very high read/write error rate and poor signal quality. SCSI architecture is a lot more demanding to the quality of drive components which Seagate also lowered to cut costs. So what do we have now?
Seagate drives are bricking left and right, coz that's what server drives do when they encounter errors to allow for data restoration. Seagate is working very closely with data recovery companies. In fact, their drives are designed to not only simplify recovery process, but to also ensure continuing supply of bricked drives. Seagate doesn't care if your drive bricks. After that you're supposed to pay the recovery company if the data is precious enough.
On the contrary, recovery companies don't like WD drives. They are made differently, therefore in most cases data recovery is not possible since every drive is basically unique so you can't use head assemblies from other drives or PCBs etc.
WD drives up to 1TB have been and are very reliable unlike Seagates. Post 1TB WD is also having difficulties but they are still far better than anything Seagate these days. A lot of people have encountered dead 2TB WD Greens, for instance. Reply
sduguid - Tuesday, November 08, 2011 - linkI'm just not seeing the same thing you are. I've put a ton of 7200.12 drives in the field and have had one failure. 7200.11 also with one failure but, realistically, I used very few of them because they were replaced with the 7200.12'sfairly quickly by Seagate. I'm sure there was a reason for that.
Yes, by the way, I am indeed serious about having used thousands of Seagate drives and experienced almost no failures.
However, even in the thousands, I suspect the number is statistically not significant enough to be of great use.
It is, though, somewhat better than "I had two seagate drives and both gave me problems. Seagate sucks and all their drives fail"
I think one thing everyone can agree on is that the Maxtor drives of the 40GB and 80GB era must have had a horrible failure rate :) Reply
Booster - Tuesday, November 08, 2011 - link"Yes, by the way, I am indeed serious about having used thousands of Seagate drives and experienced almost no failures."
Excuse me, but how could you have used thousands of drives? It's physically impossible. You could've installed them and shipped those many PCs to consumers, but in actuality there'd be no way for you to observe them.
Modern Seagate drives are the worst, and it's not just my personal experience - it's a fact. Seagate took a wrong turn redesigning their consumer drives from the ground up. Now I hear rumors they've been investing heavily into the new architecture so maybe future drives won't suck as much, but that's yet to be seen.
To sum it up, 7200.11s had bricking issues. But not only that. I personally have used several 7200.11 drives and did observe instability. For instance, some of them would show increasing High Fly Writes count IIRC, and then one day would just start clicking and the PCs would freeze. But they wouldn't die surprisingly, however those aren't the drives I can trust obviously.
Newer 7200.12 generation drives tend to quickly develop reallocated sectors. I mean like all of them and it speaks for itself. Don't know if they brick just as often as 7200.11, but I'm not willing to try.
No such problems with any WD, Samsung or Hitachi drives. Now that the latter two have quit the market, I just don't see Seagate being a viable option. Reply
JHBoricua - Thursday, November 10, 2011 - link"Some of the 7200.11 drives were a bit of a fiasco and required firmware updates to work properly but those issues seemed to be under only specific and rare circumstances."
Sure, if you consider power-cycling a computer a rare circumstance. The issues with the 7200.11 drives are well documented and it wasn't just 'some' by any small margin. Please don't try to rewrite history.
I personally had 10 out of 20 new drives fail within 2 weeks because of the issue. I'm sure the other 10 would had failed had I not updated the firmware after researching the problem. And Seagate's handling of the issue with denial after denial was idiotic. Haven't bought a drive since.
Since then, even after the update, I've had to RMA 5 of those 20 drives back to Seagate. One of the 'certified refurbished' drives I got back as replacement failed within a week. Haven't bought a Seagate drive since. Reply
sduguid - Tuesday, November 08, 2011 - linkThere's really not much point in going back and forth on this any further. I have a large number of drives in active service and I do not see the issues you are referring to.
The 7200.11 family was largely skipped over and I am perfectly willing to agree that it may have been problematic. As I said earlier, there is likely a reason they replaced that family so quickly. I used few of them. 7200.12 I have found to be rock solid.
Everyone has their preferences and we're not going to convince each other to change so I think we can agree to disagree.
By the way, it is possible that I will start to see abnormal issues or failures with the 7200.12 series but I'm simply saying that I have not to this point. Reply
JHBoricua - Thursday, November 10, 2011 - linkYou can buy the 2TB drive for a cool $289.00
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8... Reply
mikbe - Sunday, May 20, 2012 - linkI wonder if the target audience is people that use an SSD as their primary drive but want a moderately fast second data drive. Something they can use for: storing infrequently used files, a scratch disk, Internet browser temp files, Microsoft's virtual memory, and other activities that write a lot of tiny temporary files that will decrease the life of an SSD.
They want a middle of the road drive that will be reliable and fast but they don't need a 10,000RPM drive that will die in a year and uses as much energy as a small hamlet or a 5,400RPM Eco drive that takes forever to transfer data back and forth. Reply
UltraTech79 - Sunday, April 21, 2013 - linkHmm no dB measurements? C'mon.. Reply
n13L5 - Saturday, June 29, 2013 - linkOne would really wish Anandtech and everybody else would vastly reduce the role of speed benchmarks in their tests for hard drives...
Instead, give some room to figure out likely reliability and at least quote MTBF, if its rated for 24/7 operation or 8 hours/5days a week etc...
Reliability, heat and noise far outweigh any speed considerations since we have SSDs.
Its a huge drag to slog through review after review, being presented with the same benchmark charts that are very close to irrelevant now. They should at most occupy 1/4 of a review. Reply
oranos - Wednesday, May 14, 2014 - linkThis + SSD OS with cache partition for Intel Rapid Storage Technology is the ideal setup for any home user. Reply
Alientech - Thursday, May 28, 2015 - linkI got an email from Seagate if I would partake in their questionare and would be willing to do reviews for samples and the last question was would I recommend their products to others. After having been strongly attacked when I was trying to find out more information on some of their drives, I believe people think if they come out strongly against those who comment negatively then companies will consider them for review units. I just dont see the point otherwise for such strong opinions from people who have no experience. If anything a company like blackbaze can be trusted to more accurately show their experiences especially when it matches your own. Using thousands of drives and not having more a couple of failures defies even the marketing that the companies put out and they should take photos of such people and post it with their recommendations because of such good luck in getting all the high quality drives. Its like getting 5GHZ intel cpu's without having to buy millions like some companies do to actually get a couple of them they can show off with.
I also wonder about some of the tests. My crucial 240GB M500 SSD showed a far different picture than what I seen in review sites and I could not figure it out for an year. Where ever there was data on the drive it would show read speeds of 250MB, the blank areas would show 500MB read speeds.. On just one site I saw a similar snapshot explaining that it was the address translations slowing down the drive when reading from the used data area. So how come other sites say they were benching dirty drives but it not showing the same problems? The same way, when I benched this ST3000DM001 I saw very different results. It was like they were using zones of SMR to fit more data and seagate itself would provide no information on it. The 8 or so zones on the drive showed the data read speeds slowing down and then picking up again, which I never seen on any other drive. It could be seagate was testing new ways to pack in more data and also have SMR type tracks work for efficiently. I have not had experience with thousands of drives, but I do have experience with hundreds of drives. Seagate is a marketing company, nt a technological powerhouse, they sell cheaply made low quality drives for far less than others. Put other companies out of business and buy them out and use their patent portfolio to survive. CDC drives were more than twice as fast as seagate drives of the time. Once seagate got their hands of them, CDC drives were not reliable. Same goes with Quantum. My friend was always so proud of how fast their drives were and would boast of their reliability, of course they dropped off a cliff once Seagate got them. Maxtor drives were not reliable but they were fast. A match made in heaven. But at least maxtor had 5 years warranty and usually failed only in the 6th year. The dozen or so progressive drive all failed in a staggered fashion after the warranty expired for all the weird reasons.
But I did find a couple of messages even on seagate forums that they were experiencing the very same results and problems I had with drives using a particular firmware. Seagate not answering speaks loudly about why that would be. and the ever decreasing warranty periods and things like 5 days of 8 hour usage and other stipulations on how to void the warranty. It is like some SSD makers slowing down their drives after hard usage so it lasts the 10 years of warranty. Reply


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US Rep. Ben Ray Luján, D-NM, is six months into his first term representing the 3rd Congressional District, of which Santa Fe is a major portion. On Aug. 19, he joined SFR for a group interview (with a cameo from Truffles, SFR's office pig) to talk about everything from life in Washington, DC to health care reform to what he learned visiting war zones. Scroll down to play the full interview.
SFR: As a freshman from a small district, do you get invited to the good parties in DC?
BL: We've been invited to the White House a couple times. But for the most part, you're working your butt off. I was [talking to] a friend of mine [in New Mexico] after a late night of voting. He said, 'What are you doing for dinner?' I said, 'Well, I'm going to see if there's anything in the freezer.'
Health care lobbyists now outnumber congresspeople 6-to-1. Have you personally sat down with anybody paid to represent hospitals or the insurance industry?
I think people from hospitals may have come by. I think insurance agents came by; I don't know insurance companies specifically. It's been predominantly advocates who are in support of health care reform or constituents.
A House rep. said if there isn't a 'public option' in the health bill, [it'll lose] 100 votes on the Democratic side. Are you one of those 100 votes?
I signed on a letter that said if the public option isn't in there, don't count on our support…If it's a piece of legislation that doesn't achieve the reform we think is necessary, that's where we say no.
On energy, do you see a realistic path to shifting the labs' mission?
We've talked about cyber security, as an example, and homeland security. Not a lot of people think about the capabilities we have at Los Alamos [National Laboratory] and how they can share their experience in cyber security to national security and how they can protect big business, small business from the threats that are coming in. Last week, 130 million credit card holders were exposed by a hacker.
You just got back from Iraq and Afghanistan and, prior to that, you signed on to a bill to get an exit strategy. Coming back, is that still something you think is feasible?
It's very clear that in Iraq we'll meet the withdrawal of combat troops by August of next year. [In Afghanistan], the current rule by the Taliban, they're really the only form of law in the country, and it's by fear.
President Karzai allowed a piece of legislation that restricted a woman's ability to leave her house without her husband's permission. How does the US negotiate with Afghanistan when there are these serious human rights violations?
When I posed this question to some American officers at the embassy, [one] said, 'Look, you have to see some of the protections that were in there for women.' And this is not something I thought about. The concerns I had were, if you were raped or you were abused, you had to be silent about it. That's a huge problem. It's a problem we have to face in this country as well, from a domestic abuse perspective. We need to bring attention to it because, if we ignore the problem, it's not going to get better.
Will you debate [Republican challenger] Adam Kokesh?
If he's successful seeking his nomination, we'll see what happens then. We're in the midst of an important health care discussion, and these are the kinds of things people try to use to distract you from the job you have to do.
Since our office pig is here with us, maybe we can talk about stimulus pork. New Mexico, like many states, isn't doing a great job tracking its stimulus funds.
We need to do better. We need to do more than just better. If we can be the example [so] that everyone else is looking to New Mexico, that should be the goal.


text:
Far Cry AMD64 Edition - A First Look at 64-bit Gamingby Anand Lal Shimpi on 5/10/2005 4:51 AM EST
- Posted in
- CPUs
59 Comments
Back to Article
gbrux - Wednesday, May 18, 2005 - linkI'd like to see a performance comparison when each configuration, 32-bit and 64-bit, includes the maximum amount of memory for the motherboard.
It is reported that Windows 64 with AMD 64 handles large amounts of memory better than a 32-bit system, thereby producing better performance.
Why did AT use just 1GB memory?
So, test that.
magnusfl - Saturday, September 05, 2009 - linkwhat i not see so far is any testing with more then 4 gigs of memory as I sure there a big jump in some games due to the limitation of 2 gig for the game which is not the case in the 64 bit OS
as when the level is reached the memory overflow goes to the Hard drive which is much slower then memory Reply
Carfax - Saturday, May 14, 2005 - linkAnand may have underestimated how GPU bound 1024x768 at VERY HIGH quality is. The guy who claims the 46% increase used Medium quality settings, which may have exposed the processors influence a lot more. Reply
Carfax - Saturday, May 14, 2005 - linkDoug, I was just about to post that. We need more testers to verify that performance boost though, because it was done by an amateur.
If it's true though (and I hope so) it bodes well for games which are optimized for AMD64. Reply
dougSF30 - Friday, May 13, 2005 - linkAnd here is a real comparison that actually makes sense:
64b FarCry runs up to 46% faster than 32b.
Gosh, who would've thought that not making the GPU the bottleneck would expose the code speed improvement?
maynardc - Thursday, May 12, 2005 - linkI have the XP Pro x64 disc and have a few questions:
1. If I install XP Pro x64 over XP Home Edition, will I still be able to run all of currently installed 32-bit apps OR will I have to reinstall everything?
2. Also, if I uninstall it, will it automatically go back to XP Home Edition SP2? Reply
Concillian - Thursday, May 12, 2005 - linkWho is the tard? The person who wrote the review, or the person who didn't read it well enough to realize that the performance comparisons weren't including the exclusive content that brought the increased visuals? Personally my vote is for the latter.
"in order to isolate the performance differences from the extra content, we only looked at performance changes with the first 64-bit patch installed - not the Exclusive Content Update."
Reading Comprehension is your friend. Reply
islandtechengineers - Thursday, May 12, 2005 - linkI thought the same when i saw it. the improved graphics are better than the 5 to 6% performance increase! visually there's a noticeable difference; I doubt anyone would notice a 5 or 6% on performance. Reply
TWilliams - Thursday, May 12, 2005 - linkWho ever wrote this article is a flipping tard!!! LOL... Look at it like this; The game runs 5% to 6% faster and it has greatly improved graphics! One would think we are comparing the same game and only getting 5 or 6 percent increase from the review, but that is not the case! We are getting 5 to 6 percent increase with greatly improved graphics, there is nothing to laugh at when you look at it like that... Any how, crappy review.. hehe Reply
smn198 - Thursday, May 12, 2005 - link#25 I can't see how your reference to [H]ard|OCP helps your argument. See the final page. http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NzY3LDY=
"Our performance results show that we did not have an increase or a decrease in performance with 64-bit FarCry with the new content. This is actually quite reassuring considering that the ECU patch is actually adding in a lot of new content, including a new rendering feature called Offset Mapping.
What CryTek and AMD have managed to do is to give us more content and world quality in the game without losing performance! They are taking the power of the AMD Athlon64 CPU and leveraging that to offset any performance differences and adding more detail in the game.
What we found the most demanding on performance is the new Offset Mapping 3D technique. In Catacombs, which employs this feature all over the scene since you are basically surrounded by stones the entire time, we found performance here to drop the most compared to 32-bit FarCry without Offset Mapping. There were instances where the frame rate was lower by 10-15FPS with Offset Mapping compared to without. However, in most of those scenes, the frame rate was already very high at approximately 70FPS, so losing 10FPS off that wouldn't cause any change in gameplay experience. Indeed, it seems where Offset Mapping is used, performance is slightly slower in those situations than without from our experiences. There are also scenes and maps though where performance can be slightly faster, a few FPS here and there with 64-bit FarCry, and that's with the extra content.
It seems to be both a give or take relationship. Depending on the scene or map, performance could be slightly slower, or slightly faster with 64-bit FarCry. Nevertheless, it is never too drastic to affect real world gameplay."
In light of your link, I'll amend my first comment from "#3,5,8 I am impressed. If I understood correctly this is not comparing apples to apples. There are performance gains whilst having higher detail. That is great!" to "#3,5,8 I am impressed. If I understood correctly this is not comparing apples to apples. There is negligible performance deviation whilst having higher detail. That is great!" Hope you are happy now.
Jynx980 - Thursday, May 12, 2005 - linkMore insects and birds? I better hop on the 64 bit wagon!
Im surprised to see so many uneeded processes running. qttask, ati2evxx, ipodservice, ituneshelper; these things eat up the ram little by little. Reply
KF - Wednesday, May 11, 2005 - link
There is no way to say for sure that the basic design of Far Cry is sufficiently ambitious to show off AMD64 well, because designers need to design to what is available in mass if they plan to sell games in large quantity. Intel only recently capitulated to doing EMT64, so designers could not design with 64 bit in mind.
It may be that AMD's intent was to show that more abitious game designs are more practical for a 64 bit machine. If AMD wants to demo advantages of AMD64, there needs to be a 32 bit version of the game with the extra content to compare, or else they need to show why the added content is not possible with 32 bits.
Why do more registers speed things up? Keeping things in registers is the fastest way to do things. x86 has 8 general purpose registers, 6 of which are ordinarily available. To do a very simple loop, you are liable to need 2 or 3 registers to hold adresses and at least 2 to hold operands. Since you need to hold onto intermediate results in the process, you are already nearly maxed out. That was fine in the original 386 days. But current CPUs can readily execute 3 ops simulanaeously, so if you attempt to use the CPU to maximum capablity, and do multiple things concurrently, you run out of registers. Therefore the capabilities of present CPUs are vastly underutilized. Adding 8 more general registers, like AMD64 does, helps a lot. Intel says that by actual measuremnent in real programs, currrent CPUs average 1 op per cycle, when they can do a possible 3. Not impressive. I hope that explains the potential of more registers.
OTOH, programs like games obviously use massive amounts of data which is only briefly in registers, so slinging that in and out of memory is going to take up a lot of time. That will limit the average ops per cycle considerably. It is only while you are processing a given chunk of data that you could get the number of ops per cycle up. The more you process a given chunk of data, the more potential speed up possible. If the design was not ambitious enough, there is not going to be much speed up. Older CPUs would be good enough.
thelanx - Wednesday, May 11, 2005 - linkHas anyone compared the enhanced visual quality screenshots with hdr screenshots? I know that enabling hdr makes the colors of the land and the water more vibrant, which seems to occur in the enhanced version as well, most noticably the better water and more vibrant trees. Perhaps crytek used what they learned doing the hdr and implemented similar effects without using hdr? Reply
Sheeno - Wednesday, May 11, 2005 - linkI don't get the problem, Anand showed that the difference between the 64bit patch and a normal 32bit farcry was negligible. In fact, the only difference is the graphical enhancements you get from adding the second 'graphics' patch. We can all assume that the quality of your graphics card will run the latter, so why the 64bit? It seems this was nothing more then a marketing stunt, and those of us with 32bit processors, AMD or not, are left without a neat update. Thanks AMD, I'm glad you decided to forsake your 32bit processors. Reply
ir0nw0lf - Tuesday, May 10, 2005 - linkAs much as I love AT, I feel that the [H]ard|OCP article was much more informative and "meaty." Their article didn't seem to have a rushed feel to it vs. the AT article, which as mentioned above feels a bit rushed and possible incomplete. Reply
msva124 - Tuesday, May 10, 2005 - linkThank you, that makes sense. Reply
stephenbrooks - Tuesday, May 10, 2005 - link^ Compiler doesn't get in knots swapping stuff in and out of main RAM or cache so often. Registers have a 0 cycle access delay :p Reply
msva124 - Tuesday, May 10, 2005 - link>That's like asking why would more cache, or more RAM increase performance..
Then it should be very easy for you to explain why more registers will increase performance.
Concillian - Tuesday, May 10, 2005 - linkI will go along with many of the opinions I'm seeing here and say that I think there is a lot of assumption in the article, and not enough proof.
- The reader is assumed to know that 1024x768 high quality is CPU bound
- The article assumed that the performance of 64 bit patch + additional content would show worse performance, but has no demonstration of that in either a CPU bound or GPU bound scenario. (speaking of the comments: "In fact, a fast GPU is all you really need to take advantage of most of these features - not a 64-bit CPU" and "but the fact of the matter is that none of the visual improvements enabled by the Far Cry patches had anything to do with AMD64 or EM64T"
Perhaps those comments assume more knowledge of how all this stuff works than the average reader has, and it's more obvious to someone like Anand with a more extensive knowledge of CPU architecture and how software interacts with specific registers, etc... Maybe the conclusion is more obvious to someone with that kind of knowledge, but I just see conclusions being drawn about one thing (64 bit patch + ehanced content) from a test of a completely different thing (64 bit patch only)
Anand, you talk about apples to apples comparison. To take that analogy and run with it... Why do you do an apples to apples comparison and then make a conclusion about potatoes?
I think it would have been a reasonable comparison to see the performance with and without the additional content to demonstrate which hardware was actually being taxed (video or CPU). Especially with the strong opinion expressed in the article about what hardware the etra content taxes. I don't question the conclusion necessarily, I just think that if you maake such a strong statement you should have real data to back it up.
I only criticize because we have high expectations of AT articles. I hope these comments are seen as constructive, because that's the intent. Reply
xtknight - Tuesday, May 10, 2005 - linkI agree that some additional benchmarks with the 64-bit content pack would have been a good idea, even if it's not apples to apples. I'm not downloading this patch for the 5 FPS increase, I want the extra eye candy. Is the content pack supposed to include only stuff a 64-bit CPU could do efficiently? Then it would be nice to compare it to a 32-bit CPU. Otherwise, I understand your reasoning that this pack really has nothing to do with 64-bit in the first place. Reply
Son of a N00b - Tuesday, May 10, 2005 - linkgood article anand, i loved your quick and to the point style on this one. Any qestion i had you just cleared up.
keep it up, thats why I come here.
If i have more questions then i read more reviews, that simple Reply
Backslider - Tuesday, May 10, 2005 - link#9 I was refering to Far Cry not AMD.
Their special content idea blows goats, it pisses me off royal. Their game sucks anyway, so no real loss here.
robg1701 - Tuesday, May 10, 2005 - linkAnand,
1. Like adding a faster cpu increasing performance in tasks that werent cpu bound ? Like the A64 getting higher numbers than a GPU bound P4 with the same card at the same settings ? Odd as it seems i dont think it can be so easily ruled out.
2. Apples to oranges it may be, but thats exactly what the existance of 64bit far cry represents just now, and is exactly how i think anyone bothering to download the patches will play it, so in bothering to do an article on it i think it ghas to be examined. Now that other articles are online, so far your the only site ive seen not do this.
3. I didnt imply they were SM3 specific, but its a difference between the 6800 and X850, and i think re-examining their relative performance is required given we now also have a new OS, new drivers, and new game code.
But no matter, other sites have filled the void and benchmarked what I and many others think is the sensible comparison - waht people will actually be looking for when they download a gigabyte of updates. Reply
jballs - Tuesday, May 10, 2005 - link[H]ard OCP reports that there are minimal diffrences in frame rates (some higher some lower) when the patch AND the additional content are applied (read conclusions). So, increased quality with no much impact on performance is always good thing. The thing that is still up in the air is what is the diffrence between 64 and 32bit processors with that additional content enabled because the game won't let you install on anything else. For all we know the performance would be the same. Reply
nserra - Tuesday, May 10, 2005 - link#33 Finaly some light!!!!!
Thanks! Reply
PottyWithElmo - Tuesday, May 10, 2005 - linkanandtech. sorry. (refer to 31) Reply
Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, May 10, 2005 - linknserra
Sorry I should have been more specific - when I refer to the 64-bit version of Far Cry I am talking about both the binary patch and the content update (as both require a 64-bit OS and CPU to run).
All of the benchmarks were done with only the first patch installed, which doesn't improve any of the features I mentioned in the image quality section.
All of the screenshots were taken with both patches installed.
Take care,
Anand Reply
Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, May 10, 2005 - linkdougSF30
1) We don't test at 640x480 in our CPU shootouts, but I should note that the X850 XT happens to be CPU bound at 1024x768 and below.
2) The impact of dual core on the comparison doesn't really change anything; performance would scale the same on single core CPUs.
3) The reason for mentioning that the new content doesn't use more than 2GB of memory is because all of the enhancements to the game have nothing to do with a 64-bit CPU; you could just as easily implement any of these features on a 32-bit machine and have the same end result.
With reference to what the patch we tested with enables, it looks like the first patch does not change any of the visual options which is why I felt comfortable making that comparison. All of the level changes are definitely made with the second patch.
As far as the performance with the second patch applied; our default demo uses the mp_airstrip level which showed no performance difference with or without the extra content. At higher resolutions I saw some frame rate drops in certain levels but at more CPU bound resolutions there was basically no difference.
1) That analysis would imply that we are GPU bound at 1024x768 in our test - which is not true.
2) We didn't include performance numbers with the enhanced content applied simply because it wouldn't be an apples to apples comparison. The other issue with including those numbers is that the performance impact of the additional content really varies from one level to the next, as does the visual impact of the content.
3) None of our information on the patches lead us to believe that any of the features were shader model 3.0 specific.
Take care,
Anand Reply
PottyWithElmo - Tuesday, May 10, 2005 - linkI believe FarCry 64bit runs more content (view distance, extra entities like bugs and birds, more complex textures) at a same or better framerate than 32bit, correct? How is this not a decent improvement over 32bit again? If, in 32bit, I turn on exra birds and bugs and increase the view distance (configure it in the game.cfg file of FCry), my framerate and performance drops significantly. This article should be torn up, new benches performed, and then rewritten. It makes no sense. It reads like its someone whose got a grudge with AMD, instead of looking at a FREE upgrade in farcry that adds extra content at a slightly better framerate! Just stick to the facts Annantech! Reply
nserra - Tuesday, May 10, 2005 - linkI already dont understand a cheat!
Anand Lal Shimpi clear this up!
The bench was made with no extra content but the pictures are taken with the extra content or not?
"The differences in the Pier level are numerous. First, the improvement to draw distance is very noticeable:"
"You can see additional detail in the rock textures:"
"And finally, the water looks a lot better in the 64-bit version:"
then must be repleaced with
"And finally, the water looks a lot better with the AMD64 Exclusive Content Update:" Reply
Cygni - Tuesday, May 10, 2005 - linkThe 64bit hardware DID make a difference in how the game was run. Look at the first chart. Not only was the game a little bit faster in 64/64... but the detail was increased a pretty hefty ammount. It wasnt some gimmick to make 64bit computing LOOK good by giving an exclusive and not delivering... 64bit computing actually HAD an impact, on both image quality and speed. Not bad. Reply
jediknight - Tuesday, May 10, 2005 - link#26:
(jaw drops)
That's like asking why would more cache, or more RAM increase performance..
(/jaw drop) Reply
ncage - Tuesday, May 10, 2005 - linkWhat people need to understand is these games were most likely NOT optimized for 64 bit. Yes the source code was compiled with a 64 bit compiler but probably not optimized. Those of us who are programmers know that if you want optimal speed then you want to use 32 bit numbers (integers, Floating point, ect) (exactly the size that can fit in a register).With 64 bit processors that changes of course. Even Tim Sweeny (probably spelled his name wrong) said he had to get around the limit of 32 bit registers. Now if we took UT2004 and just compiled it with a 64 bit compiler would it help that much? Umm, maybe a little. Now if Tim wouldn't had to get around the limitation of 32 bit registers and had 64 bit integers and floating point thats where we would have seen the difference. My point is that when people start designing their programs for 64 bit processors is when you will see the big difference. Just because they compile something with a 64 bit compiler doesn't mean its going to improve things that much. Reply
msva124 - Tuesday, May 10, 2005 - linkWhy would having more registers increase performance? Reply
mlittl3 - Tuesday, May 10, 2005 - linkFor all you whiners out there asking for more detail, go to
for a more indepth review. They list all the changes in the patch, tons of screenshots and show no difference between 32 and 64 bit. Reply
dougSF30 - Tuesday, May 10, 2005 - linkYeah, there's also the silly complaining about not needing more than 2GB for the new content. 64b is about more than addressible memory, and any speed improvement has virtually nothing to do with larger memory, but rather, the increased number of registers, and operations on 64-bit data. So why go on about the memory footprint of the new content? Reply
xTYBALTx - Tuesday, May 10, 2005 - linkThis article leaves me with more questions than answers. Reply
Bonesdad - Tuesday, May 10, 2005 - linkcool!! More birds and insects!!!...
hrm... Reply
robg1701 - Tuesday, May 10, 2005 - linkIm not too sure about this review to be honest.
First up, the comment regarding intel benfiting more than AMD, could it not just be that with the AMD scores being higher in the first place tehre is less room in the radeons performance capability for improvement ? Need more benchies to establish the reason i say..
Next up, why no benches of the 64bit enhanced mode ? We have no way of knowing from this article if the enhanced 64bit content slows it down or not, which is quite ridiculous given thats one of if not the main reason for bothering to download the 64 bit patch.
Finally, nvidia cards have historically been a bit slower in Far Cry in particular, but nvidias 64bit drivers have been doing the rounds for a lot longer sp perhaps they are more mature and can reap more benefit, wouldnt it be nice to benchmark an 6800 series card for those users who dont have an X850? Adding to this point, the 6800s having PS 3.0 gives them a different featureset to the X850 under Far Cry, does that make any difference here ?
All in all, a bit of a rushed article I felt, if your going to bother doing smaller stuff like this at least do it a bit more whole heartedly ? Reply
dougSF30 - Tuesday, May 10, 2005 - linkThat merely begs the question.
What changes are made in the "binary" patch, and what changes are made in the "exclusive content update" patch.
Draw distance is hardly "exclusive content", so it isn't clear from the name of each patch.
Which patch causes it to be changed?
ViRGE - Tuesday, May 10, 2005 - link#16: Taken from the article "As we just implied, the 64-bit add-ons to Far Cry come in two separate packages. First, there's the actual 64-bit patch that installs and enables a native 64-bit binary to run under x64 edition. The second package is the AMD64 Exclusive Content Update that improves the actual content in the game."
So AT only installed the 64-bit patch, which was the executable only, the test was not done with the content patch, and as a result the test was apples-to-apples. Reply
dougSF30 - Tuesday, May 10, 2005 - linkThere may not be "extra content", but is the draw-distance increased?
Other problems with this article, if one is looking to measure code speed improvement 32b vs. 64b:
1) Should be run in low-detail, 640 x 480. Just like in CPU shoot-outs.
2) Single-core CPUs should have been used.
But again, the biggest *potential* issue is with any changes between 32b and 64b versions that do not fall into the "exclusive content" patch. Draw-distance is not content. What about other "all-level" changes? Are they affected by the first patch, or the second?
Icehawk - Tuesday, May 10, 2005 - linkIt would be interesting to see if the added content did make a change to the FPS #s though. Reply
smn198 - Tuesday, May 10, 2005 - link#14 Glad it was clear for you. Where does it say in the article which changes are in the 64-bit patch and which are in the Exclusive Content Update?
Reading this I was lead to believe that running the 64-bit patch changed textures, view distances, etc for everything in the 64-bit version.
"AMD listed the changes to the 64-bit version of Far Cry as follows:
All Levels
* Improved terrain textures
* Increased view distance
* Offset bump mapping added for rock and stone objects
* More insects and birds" Reply
jediknight - Tuesday, May 10, 2005 - linkI wonder if the video card drivers for XP64 are at par with their 32 bit counterparts.. I wonder if the performance advantage you get by going 64bit is negated by performance disadvantages in 64bit video drivers. Reply
mlittl3 - Tuesday, May 10, 2005 - link#6, #10
I wish you people would read the article. This is an apples to apples comparison. Please read the f*cking article.
The article clearly states,
"We used our standard Far Cry demo that we've used in all other reviews, and in order to isolate the performance differences from the extra content, we only looked at performance changes with the first 64-bit patch installed - not the Exclusive Content Update."
The benchmarks are not including the extra content. Damn, and I thought PC enthusiasts could read. Read the article next time. Reply
saechaka - Tuesday, May 10, 2005 - linkdid anyone see the difference between intel and amd? thats why i bought a amd64, and whatever benefits i get elsewhere is a perk Reply
Lord Zado - Tuesday, May 10, 2005 - link#11, you don't need to justify your 64 bit processor because it likely allows all 32 bit games to run faster than on a 32 bit *cough* Intel *cough* processor. Now if you made the switch to 64 bit Windows already... Reply
L3p3rM355i4h - Tuesday, May 10, 2005 - link#10, exactly! It made a good looking game that much better, IMHO, better than Doom3. And it still runs better. Granted, the engine has been matured, but its possible they could have tweaked the AI also to take advantage of the 64 bit power.
But maybe i'm just trying to justify my 64 proc after all ;) Reply
smn198 - Tuesday, May 10, 2005 - link#3,5,8
I am impressed. If I understood correctly this is not comparing apples to apples. There are performance gains whilst having higher detail. That is great! Reply
AnnihilatorX - Tuesday, May 10, 2005 - link#8
You have to understand though, if AMD didn't put the money and effort in it these features won't be available at all.
Plus they didn't charge you for extra for their CPU because they put some money into FarCry did they? Reply
Backslider - Tuesday, May 10, 2005 - link"AMD's goals are quite admirable, but the fact of the matter is that none of the visual improvements enabled by the Far Cry patches had anything to do with AMD64 or EM64T - they are artificially limited to run on those platforms alone, but could work just as well on a 32-bit platform."
This sickens me. Enable special things for people who bought special hard ware, EVEN THOUGH THE HARDWARE MAKES NO DIFFERENCE TO HOW IT RUNS!
Thats just a pathetic ploy at the customer to convince them to adopt new hardware they dont need.
Sad Really. See if I buy anything from these assholes. Reply
Anemone - Tuesday, May 10, 2005 - linkNice to see ANY improvement, but it's tiny really. The painful detraction to this gain is that most 32 on 64 programs are running slower such that the gain in one is offset by losses in a dozen or more other apps.
But we KNEW it would take years before the power of 64bit would become commonplace even having the hardware and an OS for the hardware. But I'm seeing nothing to make me compelled to switch yet, which kind of hurts the progress :(
$.02 Reply
nserra - Tuesday, May 10, 2005 - linkWell I'm impressed the image quality is superb, but I don't know if the added image quality has more to do with the graphics card than to the processor.
Amd and Ubi should have made the older "image quality" mode available just to compare. Reply
rqle - Tuesday, May 10, 2005 - linknothing big, but the improvement is very much welcome. Reply
AnandThenMan - Tuesday, May 10, 2005 - link#2, exactly right.
Mildly impressed with the gains, better than nothing. Reply
wien - Tuesday, May 10, 2005 - linkHmm.. That was mildly disappointing. I was sure the extra registers would have more of an impact than that. Reply
weiran - Tuesday, May 10, 2005 - linkHeh, can't get Safedisc working in 64-bit? Reply
Pjotr - Tuesday, May 10, 2005 - linkWhat a pity, still, 4-6 % improvements are nothing to sneeze at, some 200 GHz meaning you can opt for a speed grade lower CPU and save some money. Reply


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Atmail is a fully-featured email server and Webmail client, allowing users to send and receive email via a Web browser or mobile device. It has full support for IMAP mailboxes, and an optional email-server mode that uses EXIM as the MTA. Features include a scheduler, MySQL backend support, spell-check, address book, calendar user preferences, multiple accounts, SpamAssassin support, migration scripts from other mail servers, a customizable interface, an attractive AJAX interface, an optional group sharing Calendar/Addressbook, and an Outlook plugin to sync Contacts/Tasks/Calendar data between a Desktop, Mobile, and Webmail client or other email users.
HTTrack is an easy-to-use offline browser utility. It allows you to download a Web site from the Internet to a local directory, building recursively all directories, getting HTML, images, and other files from the server to your computer. HTTrack arranges the original site's relative link-structure. Simply open a page of the mirrored Web site in your browser, and you can browse the site from link to link, as if you were viewing it online. HTTrack can also update an existing mirrored site, and resume interrupted downloads. WebHTTrack is a Web-based GUI for HTTrack.
Dabo is a three-tier, cross-platform database application development framework, written in Python with the wxPython GUI toolkit. The controls in Dabo's UI are easily bound to data by setting two properties. The business object is designed to afford you complete control over the validation and handling of your data. The cursor classes are abstracted from their backend implementations, allowing for easy support of nearly any backend database. Dabo's design and approach has been inspired by RAD database development tools such as Visual FoxPro, Delphi, and Visual Basic.
FVWM-Crystal aims to create an easy to use, pretty, but also powerful desktop environment for Linux or other Unix-like operating systems. It uses the following programs: FVWM as a window manager and "main core"; different ways to provide icons on the desktop including support for many file managers and custom commands; xterm, aterm, mrxvt, or urxvt as terminal emulators; MPD or XMMS2 as music players (there's built-in support for controlling these programs), and several other tools for different functions, like setting a wallpaper or taking screenshots.
PHP iAddressBook is a Web-based address book for a single user. It supports personal or business cards (tons of fields), spotlight-like search, categories, transparent vCard import/export, multi-language support, design templates, and an intuitive interface. It aims at 100% compatibility with the address book in Mac OS X.
Scopserv Communicator is an audio/video Internet phone and instant messenger that supports some of the most popular VoIP and instant messaging protocols such as SIP, Jabber (XMPP), AIM/ICQ, MSN, Yahoo! Messenger, and a whole lot of other useful features. ScopServ Communicator is based on the SIP Communicator softphone.
Peg Solitaire is a board game played with pegs: in the classic mode, the board has 33 positions and 32 tokens because the center position is without form. The objective of Peg Solitaire is to remove the pegs but only with horizontal and vertical movements. It is also known as English peg solitaire or Senku. In the reverse modes, initially there is only one piece on the board.
ffDiaporama is an application for assembling photos and videos. It is especially suitable for preserving memories of holidays. It was inspired by presentation software such as Impress or Powerpoint. It can read all image formats, most camera and camcorder video formats, and the most commonly used music formats. It includes 140 transitions and a device database to enable the videos to be correctly rendered for more than 50 models of video viewing devices (including smartphones, tablets, and home cinema systems). ffDiaporama can manage several hundred slides. Each slide can contain tens of shots and tens of blocks, with each shot containing its own block settings. The application itself calculates all the shot transformations.


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