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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.

4 of 184 comments (clear)

  1. Bah by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

  2. 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.

  3. Enough with speed. More capacity and reliability. by sdo1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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

    --
    --- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
  4. Re:Enough with speed. More capacity and reliabilit by toddestan · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.