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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."
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.
I agree with you about photographers. But not about video. It's not just videographers who need space. It's anyone with a miniDV camera. Each tape is 13GB of space. When you edit, you need scratch space on the hard drive to work. It's easy to fill up 500 GB with video.
Personally, I have 500 GB (a 200 and a 300). While I have an abnormally large music collection (115GB), I only have about 100 GB free on the hard drive. So it was pretty easy for me to have 250+GB of video. (Basically anyone with a kid and a video camera fills up tapes quickly).
Copying rental DVDs to the hard drive.
DVR functions like BeyondTV (which I would be using, but its too buggy), or MythTV if you're on linux.
An average game nowadays can eat up 2-3GB
Normal 2MP digital camera pictures can start to eat up a good chunk of disk space if you take lots of pictures of your kids over the course of a few years.
Plus the average user can always find ways to use up every byte on a HDD by screwing up application options. IE stil defaults to 10% of a HDD for its cache doesn't it? So there's 50GB that somebody will fill up.
The DeathStar line was truly a lemon, far ahead of any "oops" from other manufacturers.
Ah... how quickly we forget.
One of the first lemon drives out there was the ST-251 drives. Nearly every single drive wound up dieing due to stiction problems. Their failure rate makes the mere 30-40% Deathstar failure rate look tame in comparison.
Western Digital, Maxtor, and Quantum have all had various drive lines that have had significant failures, although none as consistently as either the ST-251s or the Deathstars. Still, a 20% failure rate is nothing to joke about.
About the only drive maker that I haven't heard of significant failures from so far is Samsung. They've only been in the broad consumer market for a few years now, so it's not exactly fair to compare them against these others that have been around 20-30 years. Give them enough time and they'll screw up eventually.
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?
I buy two very similar capacity units from two different manufacturers (ie: Seagate + Western Digital) so I don't get caught out by a manufacturing defect - that happened many years ago to a company for which I was doing some freelance work - two hard disks in their server's RAID 5 array had drive motor bearing failures within about 15 minutes of each other!
AT&ROFLMAO