Attack of the Giants: 400GB Hard Drives Compared

Keefe writes "Recently, Hitachi and Seagate have come out with two of the biggest desktop hard drives available on the market at a massive 400GB each. These two drives carry almost identical specifications, with the exception of the Seagate Barracuda and its Native Command Queuing technology. Read the review at Techware Labs to see how these two drives compare head to head, with and without NCQ enabled, and in a RAID configuration."

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Hitachi Deskstar 7K400 power management features

[the_ed_dawg]

One interesting thing about the Hitachi is that it has dynamic RPM (DRPM) scaling, so it will slow down to prevent overheating. This is useful because it prevents the drive from exceeding its thermal envelope. Other drives must stop processing when they reach their maximum rated temperature to prevent data corruption and mechanical failure. Granted, "stop processing" means several milliseconds of pause, but would you rather run really fast in bursts or just run continuously? Another neat feature is that DRPM will allow power management without completely shutting down the drive, providing good quality-of-service without wasting power. Considering that data centers spend a great deal of money on powering disk arrays and cooling them sufficiently, this could really take off in the server market. See Gurumurthi et al. for details.