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Hitachi's 500GB SATA-II Reviewed
Doggie Fizzle writes "The specifications for the Hitachi Desktstar 7K500 are impressive. 500 GB of disk space, 16 MB of cache memory, and 3.0 Gbps of transfer speeds are about as good as you are going to get in today's hard drives. The only category that might be rivaled is transfer speed, but that would require RAID or an Ultra320 SCSI drive to do so. This BigBruin review matches it up with some Seagate drives to show off its performance."
They dont like you calling it that. There's not SATA 2 standard as yet.
It's instead, SATA 3Gb/s. Most motherboard manufacturers jumped the gun however and invented their version.
Matt
My friend Ben had one of the infamous Deathstars; he had to pay shipping to IBM after it died, and the replacement died within one month, and the next replacement within two months, and the next replacement within two months, and he had to pay shipping and go without a hard disk each time. I think his fourth or fifth Deathstar finally lasted him a decent little while, or he got another disk.
Anyway, if IBM thinks that's acceptable, I won't ever be buying one of its disks.
SATA-II indeed supports that. So does the disk. From cache.. No way it reaches more than 50MiB/sec from the platters, which is what counts. So I think it should be dead easy to rival speed with raid. My 6 year old IBM 18.2GB UltraStar drives read 25MiB/sec, so 3 of them would outperform in read/write. But would not take that much data...
So, indeed, it is a large disk, but it is not extraordinarily fast. Of course, bigger disks means more data per second, since the platter size is the same. Then data has to be packed more densily, and more data passes under head per second. So the disk can read more, in a sequential read.
Assembling etherkillers for fun an profit
Deathstar disks was a problematic series. It was the DeskStar 75GXP, the 75GB disks from IBM. They was using 5 platters, instead of the normal 4, in the same height. This meant denser packed plates, which ment less space for heads. This crashed. But other disks from IBM was entirely fine.
Here is a page with more info on the DeathStars. And Yes, I've been using many IBM/Hitachi disks, and never had problems with the 4-platter versions. It was just that 5 platters was kinda exprimental...
Assembling etherkillers for fun an profit
I don't think I'd use that drive if you gave it to me. That's a deskstar, aka "deathstar" in the sysadmin circles. I have a STACK of those drives at work, all doing the same thing. Power them on, and you hear a chirp-click-chirp-click that just repeats. The drive never spins up. Tried replacing the controller card on them, that's not the problem, it's something inside. That stack is actually not all of them either - a class action suit was just recently settled and we submitted claims for another stack of deathstars.
We might have one deathstar in the building that still works, and if I find it I'm replacing it. Save yourself the headache, do not buy deathstars. When maxtor bought quantum, maxtor adopted quantum's designs, and now produces decent drives. Hitachi bought IBM's drive line, but they just inherited the crappy deathstar design and that's what they're selling.
The only model of drive I have seen perform as bad as a deathstar is the old Quantum Fireball 6.4gb's, which tended to smoke their spindle motor controller IC. At least those you could swap controller cards and save your data.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Recent Hitachi return policy prevents me from even considering this line of HDs.
I attempted to return a failed IBM Deskstar last year only to be told I would have to return it to the US, not the Canadian centre I had used in the past.
I explained repeatedly that I had always returned HDs of all makes to Canadian centres and that it was prohibitively expensive to ship a DEAD HD to the US.
Hitachi didn't care. I have never bought a Hitachi drive since and never will.
I have been using Seagate HDs because of their 5 year warranty and have not had a single failure to date. Seagate = cool, quiet and reliable.
Goodbye IBM/Hitachi, Hello Seagate.
Brian
No, it wasn't just the 75GB disks, it was the entire series of disks using 15GB platters.
Closer, but it's even more detailed than that. It was the entire series of platters produced at one particular fabrication plant. Which is why you get such varied reports about them - the same drives were made at (at least) two plants, and only one of them was broken (the cause was a bad retooling when they started that line of disks, or something like that).