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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."
3 gbps? Is that 375 MB/s? IDE/SATA doesn't support that! What's the point?
For %95 of the population, do the specs of the latest and greatest matter?
Yes, yes, I know we are the 5%.
-m
How can you trust a 500GB drive from this dubious "Hitach" newcomer who is obviously just typosquatting Hitachi's reputation?
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
Anyone know what the reliability on this line of drives is? After my experiences with the IBM line, I'm hesitant to buy anything with Deskstar on it. Just recently I replaced my ATA Deathstar (AGAIN!) and Hitachi sent me what looks to be a rebranded IBM. Same model, could be the same drive for all I know.
I'm guessing the newer Hitachi line of SATA drives no longer carries the IBM Deathstar plague, but I'd like some assurance before plunking down cash on it. In the meantime, I'll tolerate the performance losses of a Seagate if it means there's a better chance of keeping my data.
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.
when my Deskstar drive crashes after only a week of use.
Hypocrisy is the 8th deadly sin.
I still can't get past the stigma of these drives.
Its like hearing about a new form management tool from Claria.
liqbase
Alright, so I'll lose 500GB of crap when the deathstar craps out
Live life to the fullest. It's not that life is short, but that you are dead for so long.
Gravitation is a theory, not a fact.
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
Does this thing gets perpendicular? :-p
I have the 160GB deskstar.
Little did I know when I bought it that every 15 minutes it would make a loud screeching noise as it performs a self-check.
There's no way to turn this off and it's über annoying. It's a lovely drive in all other respects, but I won't buy another unless I know for a *fact* it doesn't behave in this way.
--
Toby
How long would it take the average slashdotter to fill that puppy with pr0n?
This is easily one of the most overused jokes on slashdot, and quite frankly, I'd like to meet the person whose requirement for porn is wholely limited by the size of his disk.
I said disk size. Get your mind outta the gutter.
The Chronic *WHAT* les of Narnia!
RPM isnt the only factor. Remember that this 500GB drive has much higher data density on the platters. This means that it runs over more data in 1 revolution then a 100 GB drive.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Isn't that one of the more important thing with HD's nowdays? Sure, speed is nice but it wouldn't matter much if the HD crashed after two years. Having a HD that is only three years old, but "already" started to report SMART warnings. It makes me wonder how reliable the HD's are of today. I heard alot of people having HD's crash on them, and most of the time it's HD's from the last three years. Have they become more unreliable? (And yes, i'm going to replace the HD on this computer soon. I start to notice a few oddities with it.) At least this HD have three years warrenty, which is nice. Then, my HD started to act funky just when the warrenty went out...
The last disk I had with some designed-in irony like that was the Quantum Fireball
Oh, you have got to tell us the story on that one...
The Chronic *WHAT* les of Narnia!
LATENCTY LATENCY LATENCY LATENCY LATENCTY LATENCY LATENCY.
LATENCY is what is causing the slow performance of hard drives, who cares what the MB/s is (its good enough) its the latency that kills you more than anything RAID will not increase LATENCY. RAID can only make things more complex and make it worse (no system can be 100% efficient). RAID can increase MB/s but as I've allready said that isn't a big deal. What we need is lower latency Hard drives. We have enough storage. I don't need 500GB I want good latency.
At one point, the IBM/Hitachi ATA drives had command tag queuing that allowed for performance that was more in-line with SCSI. The link is /.ed - does this line of drives bring the command queuing back? I've been looking for some new drives for servers, and these sound mighty nice, even if they are "deathstar's".
Jerry
http://www.cyvin.org/
Try smartctl.
/dev/hda should do that (yes, even in Windows).
smartctl --offlineauto=off
Still, you get a lot more storage space for the money than the higher RPM drives. The higher RPM drives have limited added utility, a home hobbyist really doesn't benefit enough from a higher RPM data drive. I don't think 10k drives are available at higher than 300MB, and those will cost a lot more than the 7K500.
$175 for a 75 GB SATA Raptor
$400 for a 7K500
$600 for a 300GB 10K Seagate SCSI
The 7200RPM drives are a much better balance for speed, capacity and cost. Part of the reason 10k drives are lower capacity is that the platters need to be smaller diameter, which is also part of the reason why the seek time rating is lower, because the average distance the head travels is smaller.
Those using the drives just to store and play downloaded files probably could get away with even slower RPMs to save on money, heat and maybe less noise.
Is it me, or have advancements in harddrives been slowing down? 400GB has been king for a over a year, and only two manufacturers seem to even have a 400GB offering. Just a few years ago, it seemed that everytime I turned around bigger drives were coming out. Have we finally hit some kind of limit for magnetic storage?
You obviously did not read the article, or even the summary, or you would have noticed that 7K500 is the model of hard drive. It is most likely 7200 RPM, not 7500 as you ignorantly replied against.
3 gbps? Is that 375 MB/s? IDE/SATA doesn't support that! What's the point?
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 true. I'm not really understanding the point of having such a large on-drive cache. I think the money is better spent on adding RAM to the main computer because the OS does a lot of caching too. A multi-tasking OS on hardware that has DMA capabilities seems to make large on-drive caching unnecessary. It seems like the testing I've seen of real-world programs on the drives with different size caches confirm this train of thought.
Oftentimes adding huge caches to CPUs nets almost no speed difference as well, and CPUs are far faster than hard drives.
suggested that this drive get very hot indeed, as it is 4 platters not 3. Didnt really seem worthwhile to me, as heat is a major cause of HD failure.
You get (more than) 3 7k250 250GB drives for the price of one of those 7k500 drives, so they are not very attractive for building a very large archive.
Hitachi makes Deskstars. Hitach, as one can clearly read above, makes Desktstars.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
http://www.electronicsweekly.com/ (UK) reported about this disk half a year ago! http://www.electronicsweekly.com/articles/article. asp?liArticleID=38427
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.
I don't want the fastest or biggest disk.
Just the quietest.
I think the money is better spent on adding RAM to the main computer because the OS does a lot of caching too.
I believe that while the system's cache excels at saving disk reads (in fact it's faster and more effective than the disk controller's cache ever could be) the disk controller's cache can offer significant acceleration for disk writes. The system's cache can only postpone writes, not accelerate them. With a controller cache, data may be dumped to the disk controller at the full bus speed, rather than being limited by the speed of the spinning metal.
I think you'll find that when comparing drives with identical specs apart from the controller cache (Western Digital, for example, has offered "Standard" 2MB cache and "Special Edition" 8MB cache versions of otherwise identical units for some years), the drive with the larger cache does indeed get better benchmark scores.
And 8MB or even 16MB of RAM for the disk controller is very cheap these days. Skimping on that cache wouldn't save enough money to make a significant upgrade to the system RAM.
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
These big drives seem destined to be available only with fast IO interfaces. Makes sense when the data object is consumed at high-bandwidth, like HDVD video. Or when many concurrent streams are accessing the data, like a large scale (many users) Video On Demand app. The large storage capacity is reflected in the large transmission capacity: scaling up current data apps to more users or better resolution data.
But the biggest change we have right now is the ability of individuals to have lots of items of the same old size. People watching their own videos from their own libaries of hundreds of movies. Listening to their own songs from their own libraries of hundreds of thousands of songs. Those apps require huge storage, like hundreds or thousands of GB, for a single person. But they therefore don't require high bandwidth transmission. A 5400RPM EIDE drive is plenty fast enough, but it still needs 500GB capacity (which density might require the higher RPM, but not the faster interface, caches, etc). And for consumers, the overhead for IO bandwidth is a waste of money. As is more than maybe 2 or 3 drives for RAID failover, which also demands cheaper drives.
Hitachi's 0.5TB SATA-II drive is targeted at datacenters and multiuser servers, with money for bandwidth. So where are the cheap, huge, Personal Computer drives? Say, 500GB EIDE for $250?
--
make install -not war
From the spec sheet:
Sustained data rate (MB/sec) 64.8 - 31 (zone 0 - 29)
Well, sure, if you don't care about the quality of your porn. If you do, you should probably having a separate drive as a "staging area" to review things before you move it off to the "archive" drive(s). A nice, cheap, 100GB drive should do - you'll have to take time to review two or three times a week, though. Better stock up on hand lotion.
--Ender
Loose things are easy to lose. You're getting your hair cut. They're going there to see their aunt.
Latency is all about an initial delay in reading data.
It's the same with RAM, networks, Drives.. you ask for data, and there is a slight delay while the system gets itself set to give that data to you. Usually, once you've started retrieving that data, the rest comes really quickly as its cached, or otherwise stored sequentially.
ie. Imagine a drive with a file stored bit-by-bit in sequence. You ask for the file, once the heads have moved to the right point, the drive will read all the bits and return them to you. Latency is that initial delay.
Now, imagine you're asking for 10 files, each a tenth of the size of the original.. you won't be able to retrieve them all in the same amount of time. So a drive with higher latency will take correspondingly longer to get you those files than one with lower latency.
This is also why CAS latency is important in RAM, and why gamers will spend loads extra on CL2 modules. Also why getting 1 large amount of network data is very mich faster than getting it in smaller chunks.
many accesses are random, and access time is determined by the time it takes to move the heads to the new track, plus the time it takes for the desired sector to rotate under the heads. RPM makes a difference in the latter, since it is on average 1/2 the rotation time, regardless of the number of bits on a track.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
I picked up another pair of the Hitachi Deskstar T7K250 250GB (SATA-II, 7200RPM, 8M) for about $125 each last week. Thought I saw one of the brick and mortars selling them for under 80USD after rebate this week (but may be the first generation SATA 250M drive)
Anyhow, in RAID 0 configuration, they are pretty snappy. I've got a pair of Rapors as my main OS/Program drive, and had these as my data/work drive. The heat difference is noticeable between the Raptors and the Deskstars. A bit of a performance difference (I do a lot of VMWare image work which hits the IO hard) but not enough to justify spending my personal cash to go 10K drives after seeing what these 'value' drives can do.
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
500GB:
On the one hand it allows me to store more pr0n.
On the other hand, it allows me to lose more pr0n when the HD crashes.
Decisions, decisions.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Is there any legal use for such space ?
Compression free video? I rip or download files for all the TV DVDs i've got, and more. Average 1hr show is around 350MB in a DivX or Xvid .avi. Seems like a lot of space, but its really only about a fifth of the space of whats on the DVD. Compression is good these days, but its still not as crisp as off the discs themselves. Sure having the DVDs is nice, but you've still gotta pick one, take it off the shelf, put it in the player, switch your AV stuff to it. Whole lot easier to treat the DVDs as a backup to sit on a shelf for display, or even in a box, and then just being able to call up anything in seconds off the HD. Its nice to hit a button and have my playlist of a couple dozen series come up on shuffle. Its like adult swim, sci-fi channel and TNT daytime all rolled into one whenever i want. I have 2 250GB SATA drives in RAID0, and infact ordered another 100GB drive the other day to move my music onto (65 or so gigs of legally ripped CDs, 300+ CDs @256kb MP3). If i had the money, would i like 2 of these? Hell yes, double my storage without taking up any more room in my already full case. I will admit that all my stuff isn't 100% legal, but thats more out of practicality, simpsons DVDs are only up to season 5... and fair use vs DMCA with the issue of me being too lazy to rip stuff myself...
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
As nice as that is, it's still a Deskstar.
How cool are you going to feel when your 500 GB drive dies?
Great! Two years from now when Hitachi finishes this new trick, I can lose 5 TB instead of 500 GB to a 5-platter Deathstar head crash!
Sorry, my karma just ran over your dogma.
When you do 5.1 production, espically for DVD-A, it gets real large real fast. The final product is about 100MB/minute. The tracks to produce it can easily go over 1GB/minute.
I have a folder on my disk where I'm just playing around, not even doing any serious production, with a couple of 5.1 mixes in different formats. It's 6GB.
I'm sure HD video production is even worse, but I don't do that.