Slashdot Mirror
Half-Terabyte Hard Drive Reviewed
EconolineCrush writes "The Tech Report has posted an in-depth review of Hitachi's half-terabyte Deskstar 7K500, the largest hard drive available on the market. The drive is compared with five of the latest drives from Maxtor, Seagate, and Western Digital, so the review serves as a good round-up of the fastest Serial ATA drives on the market. Performance testing is quite extensive, covering desktop applications, load times, file copy tests, multi-user workloads, disk-intensive multitasking, and even noise levels and power consumption."
here
How does Joe Sixpack back up 500Gb? That's an awful lot of digital pics & videos.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
I don't think any of you know this, but this is the same Deskstar line that IBM sold to try and save face. I personally lost seven hard drives due to the poor manufacturing quality. Those hard drives contained data that was invaluable to me.
I strongly urge all of Slashdot to boycott Hitachi and its so-called "DeathStar" drives.
I'm not Seth Finkelstein. I still speak the truth.
We're getting to a point in storage mediums where size is outgrowing necessity, at least in the consumer aspect. Geeks aside, what everyday user needs a half-terabyte of space?
I don't think my four banger calculator goes that high?
And what's the quality of these drives. We're pretty much at the point now a days that we consider hard drives to be expendable. I usually have to replace a hard drive every five to six months, and often these are still under warranty. It seems the quality of manufacture is just the pits.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Please tell me that these are not built on the same technology as the old IBM Deathstars.
When will these hard drive manufacturers be forced into a class action lawsuit for advertising 500,000,000,000 bytes as 0.5TB (which doesn't equal 500GB, but 512GB)? Where is my other 46.34GB?
Yes - Its great to see a drive thats not actually half a terrabyte (because 1024/2 = 512 != 500) but getting close to such a mark. My question is - does it really have to be such and uber preforming drive?
In my data server I have one good, fast drive (or some times two in a raid 1) running the OS and all regularly access files. Then I stick the big slow drives in for storing files for long term. Maybe thats just because I dont activly need 500gigs of data - but I'd rather see tests about how well it stands up to stress, heat, and etc - indicators on how long the drive will last.
snowulf.com
In the form factor of two microdrives.
Is that half a terabyte based on 1,024-byte or 1,000-byte units?
I am Jack's unoriginal sig.
Everybody has their own horro story and their own brand of drives that they postively hate. I know people that will nver buy a Seagate drive and swear buy IBM, and son, and so on and so on for every single drive mfg out there. Every mfg has had a large bad run of drives in their history. What do you propose people do, use plastic? NVRAM? floppies?
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
now all the pages do it!
someone doesnt want me to get 500gb drives
someone, from the govt...
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
for the same hard disk.
Hitachi's 500GB SATA-II Reviewed. An odd dupe.
I highly doubt there will come a day where the average user NEEDS 500 gig... really the only things that take up a lot of space are music and video.
While it would be cool to have a 500 gig hard drive... that's a LOT of information to lose if the hard drive ever crashes. I'll stick with more, smaller drives, if I ever need 500 gig...
I've never had a PC harddrive fail during normal useful lifetimes with them, and most of them over the last fifteen years have been used 24/7. That goes from MRM, to RLL, to ESDI, SCSI, and IDE drives for desktop and laptops. Probably, if I had to guess, 20-30 drives total over that period of time. When I've upgraded to a bigger drive usually after four or five years, it goes on a shelf, and on the few occasions I had to go back to them, still worked.
And I'm not someone who buys new hardware very often. My fastest PC is a 500mhz Celeron, so its not like I'm replacing them once a year or something.
To make a long article short (sort of):
Conclusions
As the only 500GB hard drive currently available on the market, the Deskstar 7K500 is really without peers. Its closest competition is 100GB behind, and some manufacturers are stuck with drives in the 300GB range. Exclusivity carries a price, though. With a $320 street price, the 7K500 has a higher cost per GB than lower capacity drives. However, the 7K500's higher density can be worth the premium for systems where storage capacity is limited by available internal drive bays, Serial ATA ports, or both. Those seeking quieter systems should also prefer higher density drives, since the additive properties of noise levels make packing a system with multiple drives less desirable.
And remember, the Deskstar 7K500 is more than just 500GB of storage capacity. It also has everything one should expect from a high-end drive, including support for 300MB/s Serial ATA transfer rates and Native Command Queuing, a hefty 16MB cache, and a three-year warranty. None of those features go above and beyond the call of duty, but they don't disappoint, either. Neither does the 7K500's performance, for the most part. The Deskstar scores well in desktop application benchmarks and file copy tests, but slow boot times and a poor showing in three of four IOMeter test patterns make it difficult to recommend the drive across the board.
Poor performance with IOMeter's file server, workstation, and database access patterns suggests that the Deskstar is inappropriate for multi-user environments with heavy read and write demands. However, the drive's surprisingly strong showing in the read-dominated web server test pattern shows that the 7K500 can most certainly keep up in select server environments. And there's no doubt that the 7K500 can keep up on the desktop, at least once you get the system booted. That makes it easy to recommend the Deskstar to storage-hungry desktop and home theater PC users looking to add capacity one half-terabyte at a time.
...how many 5.25 inch floppies do I need for my backup. I'm using the 160 K single side ones.
Help end the use of Sigs. Tomorrow
347,223 1.44mb floppies, assuming they're all filled 100% (except for the last one, which is filled 2/9ths of the way)
Synergy is your friend
About 3.6 million floppies, if I haven't slipped a digit.
As for slipping digits and four-banging the calculator... well, now that we've got the diskspace, let's see the .torrent.
It's great to have a ton of space, but I have enough for what I do on the pc without these massive half a TB drives. I want faster drives now... not bigger ones.
Muahahhahahahahahah.
to full sized porn without worries about size constraints.
I don't need a 500 GB disk for serving static webpages, which are best done with enough RAM to push them all or something like akamai. It's noisy while it's idle and draws power like a hungry hog. I expect that it needs a decent bit of cooling too.
Lastly this is a 7,2000 RPM disk that costs 320 odd dollars. What do you think ?.Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
Joe Sixpack?
He makes two partitions, uses 250GB for his working drive, and then uses ghost to mirror it to the second partition every couple of months. How can you lose?
What you forgot to ask is how his tech savvy cousin (who also does taxidermy and accounting) makes it faster, larger, and redundant. In that case he makes 7 partitions and uses software to do a raid5 setup over the first 6 partitions, using the last one as parity. 428GB with a perfect, online safety net. Pretty smart, huh?
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
This drive is finally more powerful than my brain which can store exactly 487 GB of information per lifetime. Wait, did I already post this message??
Help end the use of Sigs. Tomorrow
I've had some drives die on me over the past few years. It's generally quick and unexpected, but sometimes you know they'll fail soon when you hear the terrible whine.
But I've got a lot of drives. In my machines at home all total, I have about 22 hard disks spinning. They've all been running for at least 6 months now, but most of them have been spinning for over three years. No issues.
If you got them running really hot, they could die faster. But it's often just luck of the draw. I had an IDE disk in an external case with a fan die in 9 months, and it never moved (I didn't carry it around.) In the meantime, I have three 18GB 15K SCSI disks in a desktop case with no direct cooling on the disks, and they've been running great for four years. And these things run HOT - you can't touch them for more then a few seconds before it hurts.
The SCSI disks out there are a lot more expensive as a general rule, and don't have as high of capacity as ATA or SATA, but they do tend to live a lot longer under more difficult environments. The S/ATA disks at CompUSA are just run of the mill - they don't have nearly as much QC and it's to keep the prices down.
If you have a 500GB disk and you use it, you really should be thinking about backups. Even a layperson (with PC's) digital photographer should already understand the benefits of backups. Usually people don't because it's just not a fun thing to do, and you might never need your backup.
Good thing there's a lot of machines out there now that support things such as mirroring, to at least protect you from a drive failure.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
...oh come on! Someone had to say it.
A hundred and twenty characters ought to be enough for anyone...
How about huuge 500GB torrents now? You just select what u want to download from it's content. Moviez2005.torrent MP3z2004.torrent pr0n2005.torrent 6.8GHz1/4of2TBLaptop2006.torrent etc... WouldBeGood
Plastic & Metal. Is this sh*t worth livin' 4?
Is diz sh*t worth dyin' 4?
It's great to have that amount of space, but the filesystem determines how well that space is used. I have a Lacie external 500 gig HD and I formatted it with NTFS - Windows XP preferred filesystem. Beyond the formatted space available only being about 460 gig (drive specs versus computer specs) the cluster size is big enough that is doesn't make sense to store small (128K) files on it. I know it is the fault of the filesystem on the OS, but a lot of people have XP and 2K. Earlier versions of Windows won't work on the entire 500 gig HD. It'll have to be split up into multiple partitions.
My point is until there is a filesystem that has a smaller cluster size (or is database like) these HUGE drives are best used for very large files. The more smaller files that are put on there, the drive fills up much quicker than you'd imagine.
-FlynnMP3
Think about it - more and more people are starting to get in the 'digital lifestyle', downloading movie trailers and the likes, whilst at the same time games are becoming larger and more complex.
Combine that with more people starting to run digital camcorders - hence, wanting to use their PC for video editing, and the arrival of HDTV, and it shouldn't be that hard to see that there is a growing demand for high capacity drives.
If anything, the demand is likely to become higher amongst the 'everyday user' because they are also the least likely run basic maintenance operations [I.e, Whacking the stuff you don't need anymore onto a DVD so it's not clogging up your bloody HDD].
just like noone will ever need more than 512K (no, not MB, K) of RAM.
Some of the proteomics and genomics databases we are involved with need even more storage than this.
My prediction is that soon we'll be walking around with 1 Terabyte flash cards which we'll wear around our necks, kind of like peace medallions.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I stopped using Hitachi drives because Hitachi insists that you must ship the original drive to them first, before they send you a replacement. This is extremely inconvenient if you, say, have a HD that generally works but has a clicking noise from time to time and you have a lot of data on it.
My advice - Go with Western Digital, it's a getter drive AND a better warranty.
People have been making that prediction for the last two decades. It's never been born out.
There are many applications which can take advantage of such large storage. HDTV from a DVR is one obvious example. Hell, I ran out of space on my 100GB DVR within the first month and had to start deleting things, and that wasn't even high quality recording.
Then there's digital photography, video camera footage (privacy aside, wouldn't it be nifty to set up cameras around your house to record day-to-day life?), lossless cd recording, ongoing archives of various websites etc...
Sure, the quote by Bill Gates might never have been spoken but:
640K ought to be enough for anybody.
~ Bill Gates
http://www.allthingswilliam.com/computers.html
I'm getting crashed out on that page too. FF 1.0.5. Flashblock (though the page still crashes Firefox with Flashblock disabled)
I thought I'd never fill my new 200 GB drive. When I installed it, my use patterns changed -- I started saving images of all the CDs I frequently used, and hanging on to p2p-acquired files I wouldn't normally. I kept MP3s and (cough) videos around I normally wouldn't have, and started downloading GB after GB every night.
.wavs, averaging a few hundred KB each.
I had the drive filled in less than a couple of months.
Also, back when we had 250 MB drives, almost all audio was distibuted as 8khz
When we moved to 2 GB drives, audio was distributed in 128kbps MP3s, averaging around a few MB each -- ten times the drive space, ten times file size.
With drives in the hundreds of GB, it becomes feasible to store lossless audio -- somewhere on the order of 30 MB/song.
All in all: as drive space goes up, filesizes, and image/audio/video quality go up. And user behaviors change. As my father used to say: The steady state of disks is full" --- which, as I just learned, he ripped off from Dennis Ritchie, co-author of the definitive book on "C".
Based on the (very optimistic!) assumption that it takes 1 minute to write and swap a floppy, I calculate that it would take 9 1/2 months to complete the backup.
Then again, with good backup software, you'd get 30% compression, which would shave 100,000 floppies and a couple of months off. Anybody know a program that can handle that many backup volumes?
Thought I've burned my fingers with IBM "deathstars" (4 died), I'm still fan of IBM now Hitachi.
But this idea of using 5x100GB design smells bad: more platters->more heat/parts->more troubles.
Considering IBM/Hitachi reputation (only one dealer sells Hitachi drives here) new "deathstar" story would probably kill them.
I would think that the majority of a home user's disk contains either data from original media, or static personal data. Very little will be continually changing, only added to. Basically, its a 500GB cache.
:)
When you make your pics and videos, you burn them to DVDs, store them properly, and keep the data on your HDD. You don't have to back them up over and over.
And you can redownload your pr0n if you must
Opportunity knocks. Karma hunts you down.
1 TB
2 TB
And far superior quality. WHAT YOU SAY? They're not "on the market" yet? Yeah, that's true.
This one is 800 GB, and it's available.
WHAT YOU SAY? It's not a "hard drive" but an ethernet disk?
Oh. Well you got me there.
"I have never won a debate with an ignorant person." -Ali ibn Abi Talib
DUPE: http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/ 24/1626248&tid=198&tid=1&tid=218
Freaky Schitt always happens to me... WHY God WHY!!
Hitach 7K500 - $357 - .71 cents per gigabyte .49 cents per gigabyte
Western Digital WD2500KS (250 GB, comparable specs) - $122 -
By the way, why does Google define gigabytes and gibibytes to be the same thing? It makes the calculation a bit more confusing.
SCSI is better, all your (S|P)ATA users are losers.
Who can back up all that data?
Pr0n!
s/Deskstar/Deathstar
(Seagate|Maxtor|IBM|Hitachi|LaCie) is better!
It runs too hot
It runs too loud
I have {insert obscure Linux kernel bug} when I install $DISTRO to this drive
How many Libraries of Congress per hogshead is that?
Seriously, does anything have anything TRULY insightful to say? (this post doesn't count, since its a meta-post)
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Nobody cares. Well, a bunch of lawyers care, and a few anal retentive types, and about three people who did calculations on how much space they should have and didn't bother to look at reality.
Even if you aren't a troll, you should be modded into troll heck (Phil, where are you with that pitchspoon?) for propagating this silliness.
If you really, really think this is important, then I really, really think you need a month at the beach. [I know I do, but for different reasons...]
a single drive that could store an entire year's worth of PR0N in DivX format!
Just one laptop.
Because Tera = 10^12.
'Tera', 'Mega' et all are all generic prefixes that are NOT limited to use in the computing field. They're right to advertise as 0.5TB because 500,000,000,000 is one half of a Terabyte.
The duplicity of the terms has caused confusion for a while, and as a result there is a movement to try and end the confusion - basically, getting us IT guys to start using Kibi, Mebi, Gibi, Tebi, etc. instead. Consult W/Pedia for more.
I usually have to replace a hard drive every five to six months
The culprit might not be shoddy manufacturing but rather power problems within your house. I am not an electrician but when I had one at my house recently he told me my line voltage was 105 volts. In my area, it's supposed to be 120 volts. In researching it, I discovered that most power companies guarantee 113 to 127 volts of power. Going outside of this range leads to premature failure of components and appliances, especially ones that have motors in them (like hard drives).
Again, I'm not an electrician and I'm sure someone will find something to correct me on but I was informed that when your voltage is too low, things like motors draw more current to compensate which makes them fail sooner.
It's worth checking with a $19 voltage meter, anyway, especially considering the fix is a free phone call to your power company for a free fix.
I'm a big tall mofo.
only thing I found odd was there was about 5 posts before yours and none of them mentioned that this is a obvious dupe.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
500GB ought to be enough for anybody
Yesterday I read something about TWO TB, IN A LAPTOP! Ha!
(for those failing to detect the humor, I know yesterdays' article was a hoax.)
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
I've had so many of these go zzzzzzzzz.... that we don't buy them anymore
Didn't your chem teacher burn into your brain to always use units like mine did? Google makes unit use trivial (well, except they don't have a unit called "floppy"). And it's only 7.73 months if you use 3 1/2" (1440 kibibit) floppies.
Everybody is talking about Joe Sixpack, who the hell is he?
Good idea, they can burn them at night for heat.
L0LZ0R$!
I have poured hot grits down my pants.
Thank you.
So how many libraries of congress would that be.
You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer. - Winston Churchill
And I'll get 4 and make a RAID-5 array and use the extra 500GB for porn...
http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html
http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html
dont confuse mega/mebi/kilo/kibi/giga/gibi/tera/tibi and so forth.....
get your facts right
Seems it has a 3 year warranty. So the mfg believes in the product.
It only holds 500 hours of video. If I watched every minute from waking to sleeping, I use that up in a month :-(
So thats what they use in the 6.8GHz 1TB RAM and 2TB HDD Laptop!!
Joe is still working on "Left click with your right hand!"
The total space available on any hard drive is approximately 75% of the total amount of data you would like to store on it.
Corollaries:
a) The failure rate for hard drives is 100%
b) Backup media is always less than 40% of what is needed
c) Hard drives always fail at the most inconvenient time
d) All drives all full in 4 months.
e) Microsoft products always make the most inefficient usage of any hard drive and have programs that automagically fragment the drive in the background.
Don't forget another 9 1/2 months to verify each floppy, to ensure that the backup is valid...
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
You can get solid-state storage to the tune of a few GB per module, and software-RAID them together if need be.
It'll cost you though, and I wouldn't count on more than a few hundred re-writes with some of them.
If you really want fast, load up a few TB of RAM and use it as a ramdisk. Just have battery backup.
More realisticly, put a large battery-backed-up cache on your drives, one big enough to hold your "working set" so the drive hardly ever has to read anything it's read in the last 10 minutes.
Fast, good, cheap: pick two.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Toilet paper is also in short supply down there.
*drools*
If it's size that's the issue, just tie several jumbo drives together as one logical super-jumbo drive.
Now, if you want size, speed, ease of backup, vulnerability to failure, low cost, small form factor, low power requirements, etc. etc. then it's not this easy. 4 3.5" 0.5TB drives in a software raid-0 may be cheap but it's more vulnerable to failure, more cpu-intensive, takes more electricity, etc. etc. than the single 3.5" 2TB drive that will come out sometime in 2006 or 2007.
Need more than 2 TB in a single logical drive? If you have the money, industry has a solution.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Well, with a 6,8 GHz optical quantum processor, speed should be the least of your concerns...
I recently ran out of space on my two internal 250 SATA's (I use one to back up the other on a schedule) so I bought two of these with the SATA sled, put the two internal 250's there and installed two of these 500's internally. Perceptions:
::cough:: pr0n ::cough:: library... ;)
1) Whoa. We have space, sir! And lots of it!
2) Slightly, yet noticeably, faster.
3) Seems quieter than the 250's.
4) Installation is a BREEZE on the G5... and quite ingenious as usual for Apple. Their internal hardware design is a joy to work on.
5) The G5 already has a fan pointing at the internal drive bay, so no additional cooling was necessary
6) The 250's happily run in the TrayDock enclosures (they don't have fans, but their all-metal design does conduct heat away well) and I can swap them out after an unmount, live, very easily
7) Did I mention I have almost a terabyte of backed-up storage now, for home use. mmmm, massive media
8) OK, I can only afford this because I am not getting laid lately. Hence no money going to women. So quitcherbitchin' if you're gettin' some. I'd upgrade to some a THAT, given the choice.
2.5" are coming to the enterprise (Seagate Savio). Expect to see them in consumer gear too in a couple of years.
See pcguide for some reasons why the move to smaller platters is happening.
It's quite clear (to me anyway) that these prefices were made up to sound just differently enough from the base-10 meaning be distinguishable yet still sound close to the accepted spelling/pronunciation. Unfortunately, this is a task that should have been assigned to linguists!
"Tebibyte" looks and sounds more like a cousin to a trilobite. When I first read the term, it just struck me as being a more appropriate title for an ancient arthropod.
"Kibibyte" makes me immediately think of the old dog food commercial. I'm gonna get me some Kibibs and Bytes!
"Mebibytes" sounds like it should be some kind of new science. Hello, class, and welcome to mebibytology 101.
I have great respect for engineers because I know that I could never do their job or look at things quite as they do, but this is clearly something that should have been handed over to techically-competent linguists.
Regardless, until the OPERATING SYSTEMS start showing their disk capacities in base-10, there will always be a presumption of loss of data. There is not one operating system that I know of that uses base-10 for disk capacity calculation. Until that changes, the hard drive manufacturers are merely looking gain a marketing advantage by advertising a capacity that is not silimarly represented in the operating system.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
What is the obsession with speed for a drive that will really only be used for storage of low-bitrate media, like HDTV. (yes, that is very low bitrate compared to what these drives can deliver)
I would really like a drive like this that runs at 5400 or even 4200 RPM and makes less noise, consumes less power and won't wear out very quick. They will still read and write at much higher rates than you really need, except for that one time you copy a movie from one server to another over GB ethernet.
Please Maxtor, WD et. al, save the world and slow down.
500 GB = 5 minutes of the p0rn newsgroups.
I'm a late comer to the SATA world... are all SATA drives/controllers compatible or do you need a newer SATA controller to use SATA 300MB/s?
Further, what about this NCQ? Does the SATA controller have to support it? What if it doesn't?
And how do you determine if your SATA controller will support the features?
I scanned the http://www.sata-io.org/ site including the Naming Guidlines, but w/out digging into the specs, it was not clear to me.
Thanks.
Steve
I remember back in the 2GB to 20GB era a larger harddrive always had a lower cost per GigaByte. A 10GB drive might cost $200, but a 20GB drive would cost $350. In recent years this trend has reversed - anyone know why? Are they not just adding platters anymore? It is just mark-up for mark-ups sake?
Sorry, I'm in one of those moods ;)
When piled one on top of another, said disks would form a pile 41.66676 kilometers high. (Or .01% of the average distance to the moon if you prefer...)
It would take fewer disks than that though. 1.44MB diskettes actually hold 2.0MB of data. The other 0.56MB is used by MS-DOS FAT filesystem overhead.
That previous article was only for a little 500GB, this is half a terabyte! duh! =P
Having read the previous posts about the LaCie drives (multiple drives, one enclosure), I wanted to start a different thread regarding large amounts of drive space: I am a professional video editor, so I drink up drive space like water. Last summer, we were faced with a documentary project that referenced 450 hour long tapes. We turned to a G5 running FinalCut on 8GB ram, and, in the end, 6 of the LaCie Big Disk Extremes (500GB). We armed the G5 with a pair of Firewire 800 cards with three ports a piece, giving each drive it's own connection. Though we were forced to do pretty regular system maintenance (repair permissions, trash caches), the system ran REALLY well. i would do it again with some sort of redundancy (without it - scary, huh?), but we were somewhat limited for time to plan this system. Depending on your job/lifestyle, even 3TB can be too small these days...
YOU dont need this disc, period.
Hint: for somebody who NEEDS storage space, this drive will run cooler and quiter and use less space and power than two 250GB drives. And thats the whole point.
Just think DVRs, Archive.org style mass storage, large archives, ect.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
I challenge you to say "kibibit" with a straight face!
a) you are the last person on the world that hasnt yet noticed the difference between 10^9 and 2^12
b) Your cluster size will be the same with 500GB as it would be with 50GB...
But as you dont even mention the cluster size (only that its HUUUUGE!!11), i guess you should just take a tour in google and remove your ignorance.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
I'm beta-testing the new "time-warp" processor that creates a time eddy to do its work in.
From the outside, all calculations appear near-instantanious.
Applications include instant weather forecasting and instant CGI movie rendering.
The problem is HEAT. Everyone is fucking crazy over cooling their CPU with water and making their PS and entire system silent without even thinking about the heat problems of the hard drive. ALL HD need a constant flow of air over them. Their temperature should not go into +50C region and certainly NOT in the >+60C. I've seen many morons thinking that 70C drive is "normal" and then they scream when their drive dies in 3 months.
Frankly, I wish that all HD manufacturers check the temperature at which the drives operated before offering a replacement. If they were working above the recommended maximum temperature of 60C, then the warranty is void.
about exactly what this hard drive is good for:
nle, non-linear editting
as in digital video, especially high def
hdv film editting requires HUGE files fed very fast, and is just beginning to mature as a valid option for high end desktop systems with the introduction of dual core processors and pcie boards
for example, you would actually want to buy TWO of these drives,and put them in raid 0, to do hdv editting
the speed and size matters
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
This is about the same deskstar line than a ford from now is like a ford from the 20s...
The only thing the same is the name. Those deathstar drives used different read/write heads, different platter chemistry, different electronics, ect.
Those fault-prone drives are 4 generations away already... theres nothing much in lines of points of failure that would survived through the redesigning and redesigning and redesigning...
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Some guy once made a smart comment along the lines of "no computer will ever need more than 640K of RAM" and now he's one of the richest dudes on the planet.
:)
Someone give this guy a company so I can invest in it!
How you ask? I just kept all the free AOL floppies they kept mailing me 15 years ago.
Now if I could just find enough beverage glasses to use all these damn AOL coasters they've been sending in the last 8 years or so...
My amazing wife - Artist, Author, Philosopher - Laurie M
This guy obviously owns stock in voltage meter companies!
> Can I quote you in 20 years?
How about right now! I can't fit all my home videos in my hard drive. My typical project is about 3 tapes at a time. That's about 40 gigs, and that's not counting scratch space.
Oh and that NTSC video. There's already consumer HD cams out there, so video will eat up space even quicker.
Right now 250 gigs is not a lot of space for a home user that is working with home videos, 500 gigs is good, but I already have 2 250 gig drives and wouldn't mind even extra space.
- sigs are for wimps.
And since I'm ranting, one of these days I'll learn to better proofread what I type before I post, damn it! What the hell is "manufacturers are merely looking gain" supposed to mean???
... Almost time to go home ... :)
Maybe that's what we should call "mebibytology"! The study of people who know how to proofread properly but for some reason forget how at certain times!
Almost time to go home
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
...perpendicular?
Circumcision is child abuse.
The following trojaned PC is hosting a load balancer for a network of phishing sites:
http://65.162.56.73/ [65.162.56.73]
Spam is being sent out sending people to that IP, which in turn redirects to a network of 0wned PCs all across the US.
If you have resources, please DoS port 80 on that box.
The ISP whose network it is on has already been contacted, they are slow to act.
However...unless you like reloading all of your HD content back onto hard drives and re-rendering all edits when one of these things crashes you'd probably be better off putting it in raid 0+1, the speed of raid 0 with the redundancy of raid 1.
I am NaN
I'm personally waiting for these half-terabyte disks to become cheap. I want to build the equivalent of my iPod/iTunes but for my DVDs.
;)
You see, since iTunes came out, I never listen to CDs anymore. I rip them once, and store the discs someplace safe.
The big advantage of this is that my discs aren't prone to scratching/heat/humidity, and thieves won't easily find them in the eventuality that they found their way into my home.
For DVDs, now, the ideal would be a set-top box the size of my DVD player that has a DVD drive for ripping, and stores all my DVDs in their entirety. Last I checked, I had about 120 DVDs (counting the special features discs) which is fairly average by some people's standards. Ripping them all would still take over 500GB of data.
Some people complain about reliability for these drives... In this situation, since I have the original media, losing the 500GBs is not the end of the world.
So. All this to say: I for one welcome our increasingly capacious hard disk overlords
I agree that there should be more low-noise/low-power drives, but to compare some of the existing drives, check out Storagereivew. Somewhat dated but good info.
The label on the drive claims it has 976,733,168 blocks. At 512 bytes per block that's 500,087,382,016 bytes.
+ in+gigabytes
That's only 465 gigabytes.
But don't take my word for it.. ask Google:
http://www.google.com/search?q=500087382016+bytes
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
No, they don't have to mess up application options at all! The way windows ships - with default settings - "eats" a LOT more than 10% of your drive, which is one thing I've been extremely annoyed with for a long time, and it's only getting worse:
-10% IE cache; there goes 50GB
-10% recycle bin; another 50GB
-12% system restore; another 60GB
-Swapfile + hibernate files; often close to 5GB
Not counting temporary files that get left behind, which I've seen so man times hit a few 10's of gigs...
Not counting the Client Side Cache (CSC), which takes up another 10% by default if you ask your PC to sync files (and I've seen it get turned on for no apparent reason); yet another 50GB
Not counting that 500GB isn't 500 REAL GB's - it's 500 HD-maker-marketing-speak GBs, or closer to 475GB to start with (~25GB less).
So that 475GB drive by now already has over 200GB taken up. You haven't really put anything on it, and it's half full! You really don't have too much space left anymore.
What's left is beyond too easy to fill with digital photos (my camera makes 12MB files - it fills 2GB cards very fast!), video footage, digital music (mp3 or otherwise). Not to mention torrents/NG/P2P downloads or pr0n either...
Not counting that several apps not only take up a lot of place to install themselves, but take up a lot of space for their data (other web browser caches, acdsee database which grows quite fast as you view pics, GDS index files - several gigs easily... the list is like endless again).
It's quite easy to fill a terabyte really. You don't even have to try, it just happens.
///<sig
That one was for the Hitachi Desktstar. Ever since Hitachi bought Hitach, they've made a point of reminding consumers about that! ;)
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
Given the way hard drive manufacturers report capacity, I make it 465.7 GB, which is a whisker under 45.5% of a TB. Of course that's before any FS overhead.
OK, it's *close* to half a TB, and it is a BIG hard drive (my first was 20 MB). BUT... if I had half a TB of data to store, I'd be short over 46 GB, which is no small amount.
Answer: spend some time moving tables with huge, infrequently accessed objects onto this drive, while leaving your smaller, more interactive tables on a smaller and faster drive. It's the best of both worlds, unless you have to keep all your data in huge tables that are continually slammed, in which case you have other problems that may need to be addressed.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
....That would be a first.
:(
Regards;
I'm getting me one of them 2 Tb HD with a 6.8 gHz chip and 64 gB of RAM Atom Computers laptops that was posted yesterday!
No Sigs!
According to this story a guy had a one-terabyte hard drive loaded with child pornography. If he'd had a smaller drive, he could have backed it up and scrubbed it before sending it for repair, ha!
short of sox filling up your hdd with a "raw" sound file, there is no reason why anyone would need half a terrabyte. With good Xvid Compression you can back up all your movies on DVD's and fit 4-10 per Dvd. Images and documents dont take that much, and 40-80 gigs will house more games than any one person will play.
all you will ever need will be 80 Gigabytes.
Hi,
I am new here. I am a writer and I write short novels. Will this drive have enough space to store my short novels ?
P.S.
I use WordPad.
Thank you!
They start shipping them with those 2TB DVD recorders in October.
you can have my violent video games when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.
Prime UID Club
Wait awhile until the price drops... because at first they're going to be horrifically expensive, and later there will probably be a drop as they release 1TB drives...
Buy two
Buy a RAID card... decent hardware-RAID is coming in at under the $100 mark (about $69). There's really no reason not to have one pricewise
Obviously, raid the two drives... and still back up the important stuff regularly for the event where you rm -rf something important, or the PSU explodes and backfeeds into the drives (I've had this happen, actually), or something equally nasty. At least with RAID though you'll be OK if a single drive bites it...
Why not pile more platters like in the XT days to produce terabyte-plus drives already? They could even add a parity platter and RAID the whole system that way.
And add an iPod adapter too.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
the fastest way to wipe 500GB in a HD failure :)
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
Transfer rate and latency aren't the same thing. You can definitely have huge transfer rates without high rotation rate. But you absolutely cannot reduce latency without increasing rotation rate, at least not without adding more head arms.
So there is a valid reason to go fast. I wouldn't be surprised if HD PVRs needed 7200RPM in order to keep their buffers from overflowing (given reasonable amounts of RAM), but I don't know it is actually true.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Can I someday read an article about hard drives that doesn't start with "I remember when hard drives were ..."?
How does Joe Sixpack back up 500Gb? That's an awful lot of digital pics & videos.
You have it all backwards. Don't worry about how to backup a 500GB disk. The huge, relatively slow disk *is* the backup medium. Put it in a USB/firewire chasis and it's much faster and more cost effective than any tape system.
The primary storage medium is a RAID made up of smaller, faster disks.
Gates doesn't really deny saying it. The current claim is simply that no one can prove he said it.
Free Hans!
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Or so I was seriously thinking a couple of weeks ago.
Up until a few months ago, I had 380GB in my file server, one 120GB Maxtor, and two 80GB Hitachis. I was out of space and was about to start dumping lots of video on it, so I decided it was time to upgrade. I bought a pair of 200GB drives, one Maxtor and one Seagate ($80 each), and retired one of the 80s, giving me four drives and a total of 600GB. I added a PCI IDE controller so that all four were masters.
After setting it all up (LVM over software RAID) it ran just fine. Then I decided to swap computers around and ended up upgrading the server (from a 500Mhz K6 to a 1.3GHz Athlon). The Athlon had been my desktop for a couple of years and I knew it was rock solid. For complicated reasons, I kept the PSU and case from the K6 and just swapped motherboards.
Things were okay for a couple of days, then I left town on business and immediately got notified by mdadm that my 200GB Maxtor had failed and dropped out of the array. Crap. Damned thing was brand new! I planned to get it replaced under warranty, but I didn't want to leave my array running in degraded mode (I didn't have a spare), so I bought another drive. Another 200GB Maxtor ($60).
The new drive arrived at my home, but since I was still traveling and couldn't actually install it, I spent some time examining the failed drive. According to S.M.A.R.T., the drive was just fine. Self-tests ran smoothly. The error that had dropped it out of the array was a DMA problem, and in playing with the drive I discovered that the drive worked perfectly as long as DMA was turned off. When it was turned on, the drive would begin to have problems as soon as I worked it hard. Weird.
When I got home, I installed the new drive and got everything running. Everything was fine over the weekend and I left on another trip. The next day, my wife called me just after I landed to say that the power had gone out and the server wouldn't come back up. I tried to talk her through getting it back up, but couldn't. I bought yet another 200GB drive, this time a Western Digital ($90), and planned to get my money back on both of those blasted Maxtors.
When I got home I found the server in very bad shape. The kernel panicked every time it started to come up. I grabbed a CD-ROM drive from another machine and put it in so I could boot a Knoppix CD and start the recovery process, but then I realized I couldn't install the CD-ROM because I didn't have any unused power drops. Drat. Rather than just unplugging the 200GB Maxtor, for some reason I dragged another machine over and used the power drops from its PSU to power a couple of the hard drives so I could plug in the CD-ROM.
The machine worked perfectly. There were no DMA errors. I ran some bonnie++ torture tests, reconstructed the RAID arrays... generally abused the disks as much as I could (I had previously discovered that with heavy disk usage I could nearly always force the errors to appear) and everything performed beautifully.
Click! The light bulb came on. The little 300W PSU in the server couldn't handle the load and the Maxtors showed the effect! The same PSU had run the drives previously with the K6 mobo, but obviously the Athlon drew a little more juice.
I just happened to have a high-quality 550W PSU sitting around, so I replaced the PSU in the server and all my problems disappeared. Even better, now I'd ended up with four 200GB drives! I retired the 120 and the 80 and set up a RAID-5 array over all four of the 200s, giving me 600GB of usable storage. Woot!
But the story doesn't end here.
A couple of trouble-free months later, we had another power outage (again, I was out of town) and, yet again, the server wouldn't come up.
DMA errors.
From one of the Maxtors. The first one, actually. Crap.
I didn't really blame Maxtor at this point, I thought the power outages had just screwed the drive up. It had been through a lot. Ventilation in the server h
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
This is not news. Maximumpc did a review three months ago, but Slashdot's lag makes this post appropriately timely. =P
h tml
http://www.maximumpc.com/2005/06/hitachi_7k500_d.
Even Seagate's announcement of *their* 500Gig drive, to ship this fall, is weeks if not months old. From what I remember about the spec sheets, the Seagate drive will be cooler, quieter, use less power, and have two more years warranty. If you can hold out, at least wait until reviews of the Seagate drive appear and make your decision then.
--
"Extra Anus Kills Four-Legged Chick" -- Headline
I have a Flak music collection of over 14000 Ripped songs in a FLAC lossless audio format. These files are irriplacable, bit-for-bit duplicates of my original CD's I use for parties, etc. It amounts to about 1TB. I have frequently bought the largest drives on the market, to find there failure rate, over mid-sized hard drives, say 200GB, isn't worth it. It is cheaper to buy 3 200GB HDD's, and get more reliability, than 1 500GB. Also, trying to do a mirror raid at that cost is insane. 32mb of cache is also seeming to becom neccesary..
ModLife.Net - If it ain't modded, what's the point?
Always
Communist,
Left-wing, and
Un-American
Because protesting for the klan to be able to march in Skokie is what communists do.
I've heard a lot of conservatives whine about the ACLU and the causes they've supported. The ACLU is not in favor of the Klan, or NAMBLA or whatever group's freedom they happen to be protecting.
If unpopular speech becomes illegal, then there is no 'freedom of speech.' Popular speech is always protected. The mainstream view is always protected. But once you get a precedent banning a noxious view, that precedent will spread.
It's kindof like how the NRA is not in favor of murders, but most laws that insured guns wouldn't make it into the hands of a murderer would keep them out of the hands of other Americans as well.
If you don't insure freedoms for some people who don't deserve them, then they won't be there for the people who do deserve them.
I thought that defending American liberty was fundamentally American. In this way, how different is the ACLU from the NRA?
I will give you a hint-- we didn't rebell against the British because they were giving us the liberty that British citizens were due. Indeed we rose up because key rights were suspended in the American colonies, such as the right to a trial by jury, Habeas Corpus, etc.
Lest you think that this is irrelevant to today, let me remind you that the ACLU is very much involved in trying to make sure those prisoners held in American military jails are at a minimum given the right to Habeas Corpus petitions.
Without the ACLU and other who share their cause in defending American liberty from encroachment by our government, we could become at any time a country no different than that which we rose up against to secure our independance.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
The 75 GXP's flagship was simply the worst of the lot, but having had two lower capacity IBM hard drives die on me at the time within months of the purchase... well, it would take a lot of work to convince me that it was something isolated to the 5 platter model.
The popular theory at the time was that it was the drives manufactured in Hungary which had a high failure rate. Again, it wasn't limited to the 5 platter model, nor to the 75 GXP. The 60 GXP line had almost as many complaints.
(I wouldn't know if the "made in Hungary" theory was true. It could be that simply that the drives were badly designed, and that factory just produced most of those models.)
I'm pretty sure that if it was only the 5 platter model, we would have noticed "hmm... they're all the same capacity" as the common factor back then, instead of going on such speculations.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.