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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."
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.
for the same hard disk.
Hitachi's 500GB SATA-II Reviewed. An odd dupe.
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.