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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."
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
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".
I personally lost seven hard drives due to the poor manufacturing quality. Those hard drives contained data that was invaluable to me.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me seven times?
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.
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.
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.