Post by zsero » Wed Jul 08, 2009 10:11 am

I have just bought two Seagate 7200.12 1TB (ST31000528AS) after using 4 x 7200.8 drives for 4 years 24/7 in RAID 5 with absolutely no problems. I have read about the 7200.11 firmware issues, but I found out that everything was solved by the 12 series.But it was not. One of the drives I bought has firmware CC34, the other has CC44. As it turns out, the CC44 drive has a seek time of 20 ms! And it is so much more quiet during seeks. The CC34 is really loud during seeks but has a seek time of 14 ms! Yes, that's 42% difference between the same models from the same manufacturer! Acoustically they are even more different, but I do not have any equipment to measure it.AAM is set to 0 on CC34, where it is set to 208 on CC44. There seems no way to change it. I tried everything, but the drive resets itself to its default values. I tried different DOS utils and with one, I could finally disable it on CC44, but as it turned out, it came out not as disabled, but only set to max performance. Since it happened I cannot set it to anything else, and it really didn't change anything. Neither acoustics nor performance changed a bit.I think it's best if I just show you the measurements: