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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
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.
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
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.
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
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
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
Eh, the ordering of the SI prefixes is actually kibi-, mebi-, tebi-, etc. See here for more such nonsense. I, for one, find the new prefixes horribly unpronounceable, and expect them never to take hold in colloquial usage, save for the nerdiest of nerds. That said, it would be nice for them to be used in print, since the ambiguity is annoying at times.
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".
Hitach 7K500 - $357 - .71 cents per gigabyte .49 cents per gigabyte
Western Digital WD2500KS (250 GB, comparable specs) - $122 -
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.
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.
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!"
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
Yes...as one who bought a 500gb "big disk" I had two major failures, one in warranty, and the other out. When I called them up, Lacie wouldn't even talk to me, even for $$$. It's not even raid 0 ... they have some propietary logic that fills one disk first and then the next, but are striped in some way that prevents the disk from being put into the machine and used (or else I could have gotten my data off).
I will never ever buy another lacie product again.
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.
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?
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...
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.