Flurry of Hard Drive Reviews

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.

Comments

When will we see RAM drives

[ylikone]

... that are as big as hard drives with spinning platters? And when will they be re-writable as many times as hard drives with spinning platters?

I really REALLY want a dependable, long-lasting, fast and ample-capacity RAM drive. No more spinning platters please.

Re:Noise?

[Lucractius]

look at hiatchi laptop drives like the ones out of IBM (now lenovo *shudder*) laptops. You may find all those attirbutes you seek there.

Always desktops, rarely laptops

[Proc6]

With over half the PC's sold being laptops and nearly all laptops' RAM and HD being just as user replace/upgradable as any desktop, reviewers should really give the laptop world some love.

Re:Performance vs Noise

[CyricZ]

I administered several of them at a previous job. They're not your typical desktop PC, but they're certainly not 1970s mainframes either.

You obviously do not understand the strength of wood. A properly built server rack can easily handle a 54 kg system. Even the pre-fabricated wooden racks from your typical hardware store are more than sufficient. You can reinforce one of those, if you really feel it to be necessary.

Don't forget that houses are often built from wood. It's a very versatile and strong construction material.

Re:Bah

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I want a solid state drive; sick of mechanical breakdowns and especially the noise.

If you want to pay 100x more per GB of storage, go right on ahead, I won't stop you, but I won't follow your trail either until the cost difference is a lot lower. Even with buying a second set of drives for off-line backup, mechanical drives are still a far better deal for mass storage.

Frankly, I've had not much of either failures or noise in the past five years, unless you are talking 8+ year old drives, but by then they are too small or slow to be useful anyway.

You could simply switch to a quieter drive, like some Samsungs or Seagates, any good drive review site should show relevant noise measurements. I've found some treatments to make very quiet even quieter by gluing sheets of accoustical foam to various parts inside a computer case that might resonate or reflect sound.

re: WD and Maxtor, etc.

[King_TJ]

Well, I'm somewhat inclined to agree with you. Though I never expected a lot from Samsung, my parents have one of their older IDE drives in their machine to this day that still performs just fine - at least 6 or 7 years now. Only problem now is, it just doesn't have enough capacity for modern OS's and software.

Meanwhile, I was always a traditional supporter of both WD and Maxtor (because frankly, I used a lot of Seagates and always had crashes/failures with 'em), but the warranty situation today is CRAP!

1 year only on any new retail-boxed Maxtor drive?? 1 year only on any WD drive that's not labeled a "special edition"? What's so "special" about a decent quality of build??

My 250GB SATA Maxtor DiamondMax drive just died on me, only 3 months past the 1 year warranty - and I'm now counting the days before the second one of mine does the same - since I bought both from the same place, at the same time - and both have the same manufacture date stamped on them.

I actually went back to buying Seagate for my newer SATA drives, because they're backing them with a 5 year warranty. It seems like the rules of "who is good, and who is junk" have changed around in recent years - so we'll see. If not, then at least Seagate will be swapping my drives out for free for me every so often over the next 4 or 5 years.

Re:Enough with speed. More capacity and reliabilit

[toddestan]

I agree. I bought some Samsung 160GB 5400RPM drives back when they were being phased out. Cool, quiet, reliable - great drives.

I think it's time for the Quantum Bigfoot drives to make a comeback. With today's technology, I'm sure we could easily have a 1TB drive with 5.25" platters. I'd buy one. I wouldn't really care about speed or latency issues, as I would certainly have a fast 3.5" drive to boot the OS off of.