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

Bah

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Seagate's "nearline" drive

[SuperBanana]

Storage manufacturers have tackled the issue by introducing a new class of device, the "nearline" drive that, when combined with the aforementioned online and offline segments, tiers today's enterprise storage into three distinct levels. By keeping highly-accessed, current information in the traditional domain of high-speed, swift-actuator drives and relegating less-used but still-accessed data to slower, less expensive devices, drive firms aspire to deliver solutions that balance the needs for performance with cost.

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?

Re:Seagate's "nearline" drive

[drsmithy]

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.

Re:Seagate's "nearline" drive

[Noose For A Neck]

No.

RAID does not lower data access times. If you are running an application with lots of random disk accesses e.g. a database, you generally will not be helped by a RAID array in terms of performance unless you are maxing out disk throughput. As 15,000 RPM disks have lower access times, they are used for these sorts of applications. That is why companies are willing to pay outrageous sums for 15,000 RPM disks.

Re:Seagate's "nearline" drive

[Alien Being]

"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.

Re:Seagate's "nearline" drive

[drsmithy]

Argh! This myth needs to end.

It's not a myth.

It's not an absolute, either, I'll grant you - but it is an excellent rule of thumb.

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

This is not correct. RAID *might* improve your latency if its purpose is very specific, the setup can be carefully tuned for the access patterns and the physical placement of data on the disks is predictable, but in general it won't.

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.

I'm confused. How isn't the time a disk takes to process requests directly related to how quickly the data can get to the application, in the general case ?

Having more drives simply means there's a better chance that some requests can be handled in parallel.

Certainly, but the chances of it happening are very low. A higher RPM drive will give immediate, predictable and consistent improvements in access times. A RAID array *might*, some of the time, if you're lucky and the planets are correctly aligned - but on average it will actually make latency worse.

Your claim is akin to saying that people won't have to wait longer at the supermarket checkout when only one lane is open.

Your analogy sucks. Not only is the scenario of people being served at checkouts talking about completely independent operations, but that independence also allows for performance hotspots (ie: longer queues in a particular aisle) to be avoided. Accesses to a RAID array exhibit neither of these characteristics.

Performance vs Noise

[Munta]

While high performance drives may be important, I feel that many drive manufacturers are forgetting that noise is a big issue. When you have 3 PC plus running at home high performance drives will just add to already high number of decibels that we have to suffer. Keeping my hearing is probably more important to saving a few milliseconds for each drive seek.

Re:Testbed

[Noose For A Neck]

Because most people with computers use Windows and there has been a lot of disk benchmarking software developed for Windows.

Besides, a lot of their forum regulars are fanatical Windows supporters, to the point of claiming "...in smp scaling windows is better than linux, and linux is better than freebsd. for vms windows is better than freebsd, and freebsd is better than linux.", so I'd take what they say with a grain of salt.

Noise?

[Billly Gates]

Most places like tomshardware and other benchmarking sites mention that hard drive speed is almost neglibable between teh high end and low end drivers for real desktop apps.

I care about reliability (gone down hill since 2000) and noise. I sense in the rush to devalue pc's into $399 emachines that quality is looked upon last in an effort to cut costs. Isn't there anyone buying anything besides junk anymore? I am not talking about servers either since scsi drives and cards are outrageously expensive.

Samsung Samsung Samsung

[slaker]

SR makes a habit of forgetting about the other commodity drive manufacturer, Samsung. How much do they forget? Well, at one point at least, an Australian forum member (Tannin, if you know SR's forums) had to send them a drive to review because they couldn't or wouldn't make the effort to get one themselves. Also interesting is that Samsung has no relationship with SR as far as advertising.

Which is a goddamned shame, because they really are genuinely good drives (far better than the for-shit products Maxtor and WD are shoveling out these days), ones I buy in preference to any other vendor's. They've been extremely reliable for me and have a nice mix of performance characteristics.

I'm not a big fan of their self-reporting reliability database, and I can't hazard to guess why they're testing "desktop" performance in their Enterprise-I/O Xeon system... nor why they can't do any testing on *nix. But those are all are reasons why I have become frustrated with SR over the last few years.

I'm just one person. My opinions aren't going to mean shit to anyone here. But then, I'm one guy with around 12TB worth of Hitachi and Samsung drives keeping his apartment warm, so it's not like I don't have a little bit of experience with commodity hard disks.

storagereview; one of the few smart review sites

[nostriluu]

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.

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.

Enough with speed. More capacity and reliability.

[sdo1]

I'm getting really tired of hyper-speed, super cheap drives that fail after a year. I've got 100's of gigs of media (ripped DVDs, ripped CDs, etc. etc.) that DO NOT need incredible latency or access speed numbers. Give me 5400 RPM drives (or slower!) that run cool and reliably! I'd imagine that most users are in the same boat. If you need a 200G drive, it's not because you need 200G for applications and games. It's because of media.

Capacity, yes. Increase that. Reliability, yes. Improve that. But hard drive speed is a grossly overrated and mostly unneeded attribute.

-S

Re:Not quite there

[bst82551]

http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000770065138/

80 MB/s transfer. $1900.

Brian

Is the comparison with NCQ fair or even useful?

[Anonymous Coward]

I see lots of benchmarking with and without NCQ enabled, and it appears that people are completely missing the point. If you have the option (and it works properly), you should never run a disk without NCQ! Benchmarking them together is a real disservice to all who don't understand the purpose of tagged command queueing.

NCQ allows the OS to know what has been committed to disk, which is very important from a reliability perspective. File systems do not function properly without this assurance, and can be seriously damaged on power failure.

To be fair, comparisons with NCQ should be made when write caching is turned off. Only in this case do you get the same level of reliability. Of course, ATA will be completely slaughtered, but it is a fair comparison. This abysmal performance led to the use of write caching; increasing performance at the expense of reliability. Now that it is possible to restore the reliability with NCQ, making a comparison without clarifying this point is not at all helpful.

The thing I would like to know is which disks actually implement NCQ properly, and which still lie to the system? Since drive manufacturers have been "cheating" for years on their IDE drives, has the situation truly been fixed? Spindle speed aside, it should now be possible to achieve the performance AND reliability that SCSI devices have offered for years. Unfortunately reviewers never seem to address this aspect.

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.