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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
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.
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.
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.
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
Hitach 7K500 - $357 - .71 cents per gigabyte .49 cents per gigabyte
Western Digital WD2500KS (250 GB, comparable specs) - $122 -
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.
While Hitachi did by IBM's HDD wing, we need to be clear.
The actual "DeathStar" drives were a very select line. IBM tried to put 5 platters into their high capacity 75GXP line, the norm is 4 for 3.5'' disks.
These lead to excessive head crashed (I've heard up to around 30% of the drives met their death this way).
Even before IBM sold the HDD buisness they had gone back to a 4 platter design which effectivley elminated the 'death' part of the deathstar line.
If you like to boycott them based on passed wrongs, that's fine and your call. (Ther are brands I avoid to this day because of past buiness practices). But there are no quality / reliability issues with any of the current Hitachi hard drives.
If you have the tools and skills, you can replace platters, motors, etc. You can do it without a clean room if your goal is data recovery, not a drive that will last for years.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat