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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."
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?
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
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
I usually have to replace a hard drive every five to six months, and often these are still under warranty.
Man, where are you BUYING your drives? The back of a truck? I've had ONE hard disk failure in a few YEARS, despite working with several dozen of them. (knock on wood) I purchase at LEAST 1 per month, and just don't have trouble. (Though, when it matters, I buy two identical drives and configure with RAID1)
Or, are you just whining in order to whore for karma?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
I think you need to re-examine your use of hard drives. I've never replaced one, ever. And I run my machine pretty hard. What on earth are you doing to cause total failure twice a year?
/. runs a story of the 500TB hard drive to store you video library.
On the topic of the original post. 500GB is a lot of storage, semingly enough for the forseeable future of home users wanting space for digital pictures and songs. However, it may soon come to pass that DVDs are forsaken in lieu of downloaded versions of movies. There may come a day, say in five or six years, that
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
Well, incremental backups will work to some X% of the drive's capacity, but depending on how large and how frequent your changes are, along with your incremental backup policy, you'll probably need a third drive.
As for more, smaller drives, there is a limit to the number of drives that fit in a case.
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".
About a minute after it's too late to save their data, usually.
Linux Wireless Hardware in the UK
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.
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...
He could have bought those seven drives in bulk and that the disks might have been involved in some kind of RAID or used on different data servers. It's not uncommon for datacenters to buy identical hard drives in bulk, particularly if the disks were part of a massive, capacity upgrade.
I didn't miss the humor in your statement. I just didn't want it to seem as though his statement was automatically one of bad, repeated judgement. After all, if there was a RAID-5 or RAID 0+1 (instead of 1+0) involved, all that you need is for two drives to fail and the whole thing is gone.
Of course, the big question is - if the data was so valuable, where were the backups?
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
Your comments about low AC voltage apply only to AC powered motors. All PC drives are powered by the power supply which converts that AC into DC and adjusts the voltage in the process.
Years ago I used disk drives with AC powered motors but they had 14 inch diameter platter too and the drive was the size of a washing machine.
The problem with that is they never really did learn how to program the VCR, so it usually falls on either me, my wife, or my brother to do it for them.
The problem is that you do it for them. Tell them no, point to the PVR, and get on with your life.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"