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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
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.
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
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
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.
Hitachi makes Deskstars. Hitach, as one can clearly read above, makes Desktstars.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
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
Demand and the end of an underlying technology (GMR heads and parallel recording).
Not many consumers need 500GB of HD space in their computer for email and AOL. But 500GB would sure be useful in a Hi-Def PVR. But PVRs are still such a small segment compared to PCs.
Plus, tech wise, we're basically at the top of the S-Curve for the current HD technology. So we need to get the new technology and start the S-Curve all over again. We had a lot of advances when we went from 10GB HDs to 40 and 60GB HDs (one new larger capacity annoucement every quarter almost), but we've started to slow down and stagnate. I'm hoping things get going again soon and we make big advances from 1TB, 1.5TB. 2TB drives.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
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.
Is there any legal use for such space ?
I have a Hitachi Deskstar 250GB SATA drive that recently died. Its death was similar to the many IBM Deskstars I have had. Fortunately, for Hitachi, it is outside of its one year warranty. Well, fortunately for me too, because now I won't have to worry about random loss of data as much due to using a replacement drive... After many dead IBM Deskstars, and this Hitachi, I will never touch an IBM/Hitachi drive again.
At the moment, I am going with Seagate. 5 year warranties. I don't have enough personal experience with them yet to know how reliable they really are though.
I believe you are after Native Command Queueing, which is a SATA spec, not a IBM/Hitachi only thing. Yes this drive does support it and the benchmarks in the article include it both turned on and off. ;)
Google NCQ for more info than you need