Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Flurry of Hard Drive Reviews

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the truth-lies-and-magnetic-storage dept.

Sivar writes "After a long hiatus while setting up their new testbed, StorageReview.com has released a number of reviews of the latest hard drives, including Hitachi's Deskstar 7K500 which now occupies the top performance spot for desktop drives, the Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 which is the first shipping Serial ATA-II drive, the Seagate NL35 for backup servers and other "nearline" storage, and the Western Digital WD4000YR, which interestingly is actually based on their famous (and expensive) Raptor unit." Hitachi's SATA-II drive was also recently reviewed by BigBruin in case you missed it.

3 of 184 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Seagate's "nearline" drive by drsmithy · · Score: 5, Informative
    So to cut through the jargon crap- in other words, someone finally remembered that RAID means Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks, and that in most cases, when you've got 5 or more drives in an array, you don't need them to be 15,000 RPM?

    RAID improves throughput, but not latency. If you need low latency, you need high-RPM drives and no amount of RAID will help you.

  2. storagereview; one of the few smart review sites by nostriluu · · Score: 4, Informative

    Slightly off topic, but Storage Review has always allowed the end user to compare any device to another by selection (eg 5400 rpm maxtor vs 10000 rpm WD) using discreet data fields (eg noise and heat). No other review site I know lets you do this, and its a very useful feature. Very often other review sites will scatter related devices across different non intersecting reviews, and I doubt they bother to break the data down to this level of detail.

  3. Re:Seagate's "nearline" drive by Alien+Being · · Score: 4, Informative

    "RAID improves throughput, but not latency."

    Argh! This myth needs to end.

    The only case in which RAID does not improve latency is that of a single tasking system.

    The latency that's important for a multitasking system is the time an application has to wait for its data, not the time it takes the disk to process a single request. The benefits vary depending an access patterns, array geometries and RAID level.

    Having more drives simply means there's a better chance that some requests can be handled in parallel. Your claim is akin to saying that people won't have to wait longer at the supermarket checkout when only one lane is open.