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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.
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.
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
for the same hard disk.
Hitachi's 500GB SATA-II Reviewed. An odd dupe.
When does Joe Sixpack even consider backing up *any* data?
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
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?
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".
The only thing Joe Sixpack backs up is his Ford.
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
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.
About a minute after it's too late to save their data, usually.
Linux Wireless Hardware in the UK
back when I was a tech for a small local computer store we had a guy come in desperate to get his businesses records back working on his laptop. Said he'd had everything in order set up by his son so it worked for him and he needed it back exactly how he had it, with his data intact.
We checked out the drive in the Toshiba laptop he brought in and found not a thing on it bar a fresh default install of XP. Things didn't look good, and we ran what we could over it finding nothing. Guy comes back, we couldn't get his data so he starts threatening legal action cos his entire business depends on the data on that laptop. We explain it's been formatted, back to the state it was when it was brand new.
turns out... it WAS brand new. Barely a week old when he brought it to us, the idiot had just up & SOLD his other laptop without any thought to backup & restore, then bought a new one the same model and expected to be able to use it just like the old one.
Saw him again a few months later. he tried to get back in contact with the guy he'd sold it to, but it'd been stripped and parts sold off on eBay. Apparently he tried suing that guy too.
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...