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High-End, High-Capacity SATA-150 Roundup
Maxtorn writes This review is published to cover a "300GB Maxtor drive, but provides a roundup covering a few high end, high capacity drives from Maxtor, Seagate, and Hitachi. Synthetic / real world performance, thermal results, and noise output are all covered on drives ranging from 200-500GB in capacity and with 8-16MB of cache memory. A solid reference for those shopping for a new drive."
Answered my own question with the data sheet on Maxtor's site. It's two flavours, not a drive with two connectors.
You are not the customer.
I find it humorous when a person is obvious who they work for or who they are supporters of. Just look at the opening line.
Maxtorn writes...
Nice username and he submits a story about Maxtor drives. Perhaps we'll get stories from Seagated, AppleJack or Solarister next.
I read Slashdot for the headlines, because the headlines, unlike the articles, are usually original and never duplicated
In my case exactly so. One of my PCs is my MP3 server and *.avi cache. I find myself juggling files of ~1Gb on a regular basis every time I download another *.avi. I'd just love to upgrade my 80Gb to 300Gb and now I can afford to.
In my experience the amount of data we store is directly proportional to the size of the available storage media. When all you could get was 1.4Mb floppies and 20Mb hard drives everything fitted in just nicely. Now we have 80Gb hard drives and 512Mb Memory sticks and everythign fits in just nicely. Next year we'll have.......
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
Were you suggesting tape drives? CDs? DVDs?
For the cost and ease of management (ie no time spent transfering things peicemeal to other mediums) huge hard drives are the best solution I've seen so far. There's always the possibility of data corruption from leaving your precious 300GB harddrive running nonstop in a poorly ventilated case with your up and down pipes going fullblast with bittorrents but it's not like you stand to lose much except your computers time.
I guess some people have legitimate archiving operations, and they stand to lose a lot of work from corruptions, but if you keep the heat low and the workload managable (and of course maintain backups) everything should be fine.
Of course I miss a lot of tech development if I leave the house for a few days.
Keep in mind that there's a "nearline" industrial version of this drive - called the MaXLine III - that has a 5-year warranty. It's designed for nearline storage (greater dependability at a cost of slower access speeds), but has been shown to be one of the best single-user (i.e., desktop) choices. It's not considered a good choice for servers.
I have four of these in a RAID that's housed in a standard PC tower, and can attest to the fact they are fast, quiet, and run cool. Great drives.
Oh, could be...
Could also be a betting game.
How many drives, if they had a 10 year warrantee do you think would actually make it back on a warrantee return
- Within 1 year
- 2 years
- 3 years
- ...
- 10 years
Could be Seagate knows and just tossed that out there. I mean, geez who's still buying 40 GB drives and those were only a couple years ago, right? People upgrade their systems on average every 18 months, no? (and I include businesses in on that figure)5 years? That's an eternity and probably a very, very safe bet.
Expecting anyone to actually keep records of their computer part purchases over on year (let alone 5 minutes after the drive was pulled from it's carton) is another study I'd like to see. I bet drive manufactures (or anyone who makes anything warranteed) has a pretty good idea on the liability expense they can expect to incur.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Slashdot used to be a great place to find obscure cool info, benefiting from millions of people browsing different sites and filtering it so the coolest stuff bubbled to the top. Now it seems to be THE place for new sites to send their articles, as a link from Slashdot = guaranteed ad views. So we get newbie sites trying anything and everything to get their site mentioned on Slashdot, which explains many of the current problems with Slashdot, and the tech news industry in general.
rooooar
How about a RAID of 80GB drives, each with 1GB of cache? That's like $100:80GB drive, $1.25:GB, with a minimum 12.5% cache hit rate. And I bet the combined cost of manufacturing/selling would be lower than the separate components, so more profitable than the rock-bottom prices they're getting for low-cache drives. RAIDs also consume extra drives for redundancy. It's really surprising that Hitachi isn't selling a SAN storage box, with RAID, cache, and even transfer to removable Flash cards, all within the box, for reliability, performance and convenience.
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make install -not war
http://www.storagereview.com/ is now trying to put reliability data in their reviews. Not sure how well it works, but it at least seems better than nothing. They have not reviewed this drive yet, but you can check out how some recent drives from all the major manufacturers are doing.
a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)