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Review of Seagate's 750Gb Hard Drive
Zoxed writes "The Tech Report have a comprehensive review of Seagate's Barracuda-7200.10 'perpendicular' drive, including a primer on the technology. They ran performance tests against 10 other drives, checking the noise and power consumption levels. The Seagate fared pretty well, even on cost (per Gigabyte)." From the article: "Perpendicular recording does wonders for storage capacity, and thanks to denser platters, it can also improve drive performance. Couple those benefits with support for 300 MB/s Serial ATA transfer rates, Native Command Queuing, and up to 16 MB of cache, and the Barracuda 7200.10 starts to look pretty appealing. Throw in an industry-leading five year warranty and a cost per gigabyte that's competitive with 500 GB drives, and you may quickly find yourself scrambling to justify a need for 750 GB of storage capacity."
One word: PORN
"...and you may quickly find yourself scrambling to justify a need for 750 GB of storage capacity."
:(
With the amount of media stored on my server I can already justify a disk this size. The only downside is of course that you're going to need two of these for your mirror
"And then I visited Wikipedia
http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/research/recording_
Watch out for the superparamagnetic effect though.
liqbase
"Throw in an industry-leading five year warranty..."
Wow, thought those days were gone.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Some keep saying that there's no point to ever-increasing drive storage numbers. I disagree. Huge drives will always be appreciated in media PCs, where good-quality video (even if compressed) takes up a good chunk of storage space. Since these devices are preferably low noise, low power, and small in size, you obviously can't just keep throwing more drives in the box: a single drive is the best solution.
Keep the size increases coming, I've got a mountain of content on DVD and VHS that I'd love to be able to rip to an online media library!
Look at the tomato! Isn't it sad? He can't dance! Poor tomato!
1. The more data you pack in a volume, the higher the risk for data loss due to mechanical breaks.
2. 7 100 Gb disks (that would cost less than USD 430) will be at least 7 times more reliable than the 7200.10 with possibile similar performances.
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
"Throw in an industry-leading five year warranty and a cost per gigabyte that's competitive with 500 GB drives, and you may quickly find yourself scrambling to justify a need for 750 GB of storage capacity."
Maybe I hang around with normal people a bit too much, but I can't see myself getting hot and bothered over a new hard drive. If you need the capacity, then sure - this is great. But c'mon! As far as the "lust after" quotient goes, this isn't exactly in the same league as some new piece of Apple hardware. Heck, it's probably not even in the same league as a low-end Dell box.
#DeleteChrome
You've never heard of this thing called a "backup", I take it?
:)
Seriously, there is no reason whatsoever for anyone to lose any data. Even if it means forking over the money for a tape backup and tapes, if you lose any data due to a drive failure you have no one to blame but yourself. If it's important, build a RAID. If its critical, build a RAID with some kind of tape or other backup.
Yeah, I know, this is "Well, no shit, Sherlock" territory, but it always irks me when someone talks about losing data because there's no real need for losing any data, particularly if it's important.
Of course, if getting that data back is a simple task of downloading (again) from alt.binaries.multimedia.erotica, that's a different situation.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
7x100GB is not 7 times more reliable than one 750 GB drive. It is 7x more reliable at not losing ALL of your data, perhaps, since you could only lose 100GB at a time. But it is not any more reliable for retaining ALL of your data, either. The big advantage in reliability to high capacity drives is the ability to RAID them in a relatively small enclosure - RAIDing 7 or 8 drives would be quite a task, while doing 2-4 drives is relatively easy.
-Daniel
Price I don't know, definitely no less than $5000 of 1972 dollars. That's about 78 bits per dollar.
This new disk is about 14634146341.463414634146341463415 bits per dollar that's an improvement of about 187 million times .
but wait those old dolalrs were at least 4 times more studly than today's, so that's about 600 million times better over the last 34 years. An annual rate of about 183% !
Because with only 2, there is *less* risk of engine failure.
Having 7 drives increases your risk of failure by a factor of seven. Unless you mirror every drive, but then, you now have 14 disks v 2...
Moderation: Put your hand inside the puppet head!
If you've got 7 drives and I've got 1, you're seven times more likely to lose a drive than
I am.
Let's say each drive has a 20% chance of failing. So if you have seven of them, do you have a 140% chance of one failing? Of course not. What you really have is 80%^7 percent chance of them all remaining OK. 80%^7 = 21%. Thus you have around a 79% chance of failure with 7 drives (if they all have 20% failure rate).
Your point still stands - but I noticed pretty much all of the replies to this guy used the same bad math.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
"there is no reason whatsoever for anyone to lose any data. Even if it means forking over the money"
Psst... Money is a reason.
As in getting TWO of them, and mirroring them. When you get into 100s of Gigabytes, it doesn't make sense to use DVDs (right now, unless you have BluRay or something) to make backups. Get another drive of the same size, or two of them, and mirror them.
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
--
..but those 5-year warrenties don't really help you much if you FORGET THE BACKUP THE FRIGGING DRIVE!
customer: "my drive failed...i would like it replaced"
company: "sure..here is your new one!"
customer: "uhhh...what happened to my data?"
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
Then you shouldn't be buying such a large hard drive if you can't afford to lose the data that's on it without redundancy or archiving capabilities. That's like buying a luxury car when you can't afford insurance for it.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
...but how do these 300MB/s SATA NCQ drives actually fare against U160/U320 SCSI drives for sustained thruput in something like a database server that normally benefits from the multithreaded i/o capability of SCSI? The "300MB/s" is pretty close to the "U320" rating of peak data xfer rate, but as we all know, the absolute very best and fastest disks themselves can generally only stream a continuous ~ 80MB/s due to mechanical limits of the hard drive regardless of the electrical interface, and most commodity-grade disk drives on the market today actually do well to reach and sustain ~50-60MB/s continuous stream rate, with ~30-40MB/s being common for low-end cheap drives.
I'm betting that in a situation where you need the utmost in high-traffic-load, direct-attached storage like on a heavily loaded transactional database server running Oracle or similar, that the U320 SCSI disks connected to a good hardware-caching raid controller card still are the unbeatable king daddy paw-paw of sustained thruput.
This drive increases the ever widening gap between available storage and backup media. Great I can buy a 750GB drive...however how the hell am I gonna back this thing up...actually even with many many dics how am I gonna backup 750GB. There is a huge disparity in the amount of data we can store these days and the stuff we have to back it up. There is no afforadable backup solution for this much data.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
So you just doubled your power requirements, heat output and chance of failure. I would much rather have 2 750GB drives with Raid 1.
I just wish there was an affordable removable media alternative. If I want to have 750GB of storage I have to buy it twice, probably 3 times (online raid 1 for reliability, and an offline drive for backups). In a datacenter enviroment, a nice robotic LTO2 system helps, but I can buy a lot of hard drives for the price of one of those.
Men are like gas, they fill the space available. -- Red Green
while buying this product doesn't make much sense economically (unless you consider the cost per "bay" in your server and you overpaid your server), there is one reason this drive is great for the rest of us since it came out on the retail market about 2-3 weeks ago the price of almost all the other drives dropped significantly here are the price per GB at my fav wholesaler (eprom.com) 40gb 1.2$CAD/gb 80gb 0.675$CAD/gb 120gb 0.608$CAD/gb 160gb 0.481$CAD/gb 200gb 0.425$CAD/gb 250gb 0.356$CAD/gb 300gb 0.386$CAD/gb 400gb 0.472$CAD/gb 500gb 0.546$CAD/gb 750gb 0.705$CAD/gb as you can see the 750gb has the second worst price per gb, of course part of this price is the extended warranty but from my experience the very high reliability of seagate drives makes warranty not all that valuable so unless you server has high cost per bay it's not really worth it (you server has to cost over 130$ per bay which is ludicrous considering my lastest 12 bay system costed only 41.08$CAD per bay) and don't get me started on electricity usage & heat & noise, since a proper case won't let much noise escape or will just drown the noise with it's fans or will be in a location where noise isn't important (it's a networked server who cares if it's in the attic) and the heat being only 40 btu per drive (or a third of the heat of a fluorescent tube not even counting it's ballast) and finally electricity usage is just as insignificant at 6$CAD per year of utilisation however this product is great because suckers will buy it at great markup for seagate which will cover a part of the cost of developpement of this technology which will last until the 5 terabyte drives and from now on seagate will probably start releasing higher capacity model more regularly meaning an even lower cost per gb in the near future (disk capacities more or less stalled in the past few months this will easily put hard drives back on track of the "capacity schedule") but I do have a question , how do you backup this much data at a low cost? tapes are out afaik since they're way more expensive per gb (reusability isn't helping much since you need at least 1:1 the storage capacity of your server at all time, but probably even more than that to compensate for failures and redundancy) than harddrives and also a lot more cumbersome to use dvd are even more annoying but this is offset by the fact that they only cost 0.0744$CAD/gb which make a disk burning robot probably a economically viable option next generation disk won't be below the cost of dvds for a long long time (if ever) so they're out too for now so is there any other option or if not what's the market for disk burning (and maybe disk loading, like a automated dvd carroussel with an integrated reader) robot these days ?
RAIDing 7 or 8 drives would be quite a task, while doing 2-4 drives is relatively easy.
For those who don't see the difference: Most boxes don't have controller capacity for more than four drives (two PATA channels and two SATA channels) and seven or eight drives will also strain your PSU and your cooling capacity. Might be hard to fit in your case, too.
Of course, once you solve those problems, actually setting up the RAID is no different whether you have three drives or 30. A little more typing, maybe.
My file server has six disks in it, BTW, so I've worked through all of this. I can easily add a seventh without any trouble. An eighth would require a new controller card. I'm not sure how many drives I can add before my 550W PSU starts to have trouble. My cooling solution is low-tech, loud and very effective: The side of the case is off and I have a 30-inch box fan (the kind you mount in a window to cool your house) blowing into it.
One nifty trick I discovered is that if you slice all of your disks up into many small partitions, then create many RAID-5 arrays (using partition 1 on each disk to create the first array, etc.), then use LVM to bind all the arrays together you can add additional disks and rebuild the arrays without having to find some way to back up all of the data first.
I just added a 500GB drive to my system and I'm in the process of changing all of my four-disk RAID-5 arrays to five-disk RAID-5 arrays. The process works like this:
This assumes Linux, obviously, is a bit tedious and requires that your LVM volume have enough free space so you can drop an array out of it. It's a whole lot easier than trying to figure out how to back up a TB+ of data so that you can rebuild your array, though. In my case, there's an additional step right after step four -- because my new drive is SATA and Linux doesn't support more than 15 partitions on an SATA drive, I'm moving from using 20GB partitions to 40GB partitions. So after I kill each pair of four-disk arrays, I repartition the drive to merge the partitions.
Let me tell you... repartitioning all of the disks holding my data made me more than a little nervous at first :-) I kept backups of the partition tables, just in case, but it actually worked just fine. Next time, though, I think I'll just create a single partition and use LVM to chop it into pieces which I can RAID together. So I'll have LVM over RAID over LVM. Sounds weird, but it makes a lot of practical sense.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Money is only a valid reason if the data is worth LESS than the cost of a backup solution. In many cases, the nominal cost of a backup solution is far less than the value of the data on the computer.
Someone may say "I can't afford a new $80 drive to back up my data." But when they lose years of family photos and other documents, that $80 doesn't seem like so much compared to the hundreds or thousands of dollars it costs to do data recovery on a broken hard drive.
Now be nice. He is right, 0.07% is correct.
The chance of any one failing is the same as 1 - the chance of none failing. If you have n gadgets with a risk of failure of m, the risk of any one or more failing is 1-((1-m)^n). For 0.01% (0.0001) and 7, that puts your risk of any disk failing at about 0.07%. 1 - (1 - 0.0001 ) ^ 7) = 0.0006997901 ... or about 0.07%.
The idea is the chance of any one or more failing is really the flip side of the chance of none failing. If any item has a p chance of happening, then the chance of them all happening is p1 * p2 * ... pn. So, if we have a chance of one drives survival at .9999, the likelyhood that all will survive is that 0.9999 ** 7.
RAID-5 [or 6]. If you're running something where you have 750GB of information chances are you can justify spending 2-3K on reliable storage.
3x750 in RAID-5 would net you about 1.3TiB of storage and would allow upto one drive to completely die without losing data. If you're more paranoid you could use 4x750 and have upto two drives die.
The RAID access will be automatic so effectively you're always backing data up.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Buy 2 drives, use the second one for backup.
Put it in a USB adapter and use rysync.
Quick, easy, cheap.
As the owner of a MythTV box equipped with dual HD cable boxes (*and* fortunate enough to have a cable provider that doesn't 5C encode its HD premium movie channels) and a HD over-the-air capture card, all of which I can use simultaneously, I can testify to that.
Here's my experience with bandwidth use:
* Digital non-HDTV channels generate the smallest files at about 900-1000MB/hour for a movie channel and up to 1200MB/hour for a cartoon (with probably a lower-quality feed).
* Analog channels such as TCM generate about 2900MB/hour due to the extra noise.
* HDTV premium movie channels generate about 4400MB-4700MB/hour.
* A high-bandwidth HDTV channel (defined as HDNet or Discovery HD Theater and most network affiliates over cable or over-the-air) generates 7400-7700MB/hour . . .
* Except for ABC and Fox, whose 720p programs record at about 5.8GB/hour.
On the MythTV box's dedicated NAS, I have (according to MythWeb) 176 programs, using 1.6 TB (324 hrs 32 mins) out of 1.8 TB (111 GB free). Almost all of the programs are high-definition movies. Examples:
* The Untouchables, 125 minutes, 16GB
* St. Elmo's Fire, 120 minutes, 15GB
* Shakespeare in Love, 125 minutes, 16GB
* Ben-Hur, 215 minutes, 15GB
* The Matrix Revolutions, 135 minutes, 11GB
* A Passage to India, 165 minutes, 21GB
* La Bamba, 110 minutes, 14GB
* Mona Lisa Smile, 120 minutes, 6.1GB (Commercials transencoded out)
* Spider-Man 2, 135 minutes, 12GB
* Batman Begins, 150 minutes, 11GB
* Seabiscuit, 180 minutes, 10GB (Commercials transencoded out)
* Witness, 115 minutes, 11GB
* The Passion of the Christ, 135 minutes, 9.8GB
* The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, 205 minutes, 19GB
* Doctor Zhivago, 215 minutes, 14GB
* Emma, 129 minutes, 12GB
* Bye Bye Birdie, 124 minutes, 16GB
* Giant, 204 minutes, 26GB
* GoodFellas, 154 minutes, 12GB
* Bullitt, 124 minutes, 16GB
* Real Genius, 119 minutes, 11GB
* Pulp Fiction, 164 minutes, 12GB
. . . etc., etc. Many of the larger-sized films were recorded off of HDnet Movies, which is an especial godsend for any movie lover. (I *can't wait* for the day TCM starts broadcasting in HD!) My all-time champion, now unfortunately lost in a box rebuild, was NBC's The Sound of Music annual broadcast. Four hours, including commercials, and 28GB!
Solar scientific data is growing too large to handle. The SOHO data are almost small enough to ship around by internet (the whole dataset is something like 20-30 TB for 10 years of operation), though data mining and such are starting to fall back on SneakerNet as the SDAC is shipping around terabyte lunchbox drives as their preferred method of bulk data export.
But Solar Dynamics Observatory, which is currently being built, will generate about 3 TB of data per day. We're all a little worried about how to distribute, store, and use such vast quantities of data. Perpendicular-storage drives like these just might save the day...
Seems to me that eventually I will trust my backup to a transparent, automatic, secure system that puts it on the Net somewhere. I currently use FTP to back up and transport from work to home and back. The hard disk is the sameone my website is on; and it is co-located. But someone will make better software to automate everything. I hope it is open source freeware.
Help end the use of Sigs. Tomorrow
is not the noise power etc. but if it's going to die after 12 months and take your precious por...data with it.
Not only that, but you NEED a hot spare. If you have a RAID made up of a bunch of the same drive, and one fails, it should be a warning sign to you. The other drives are substantially the same as that one, and they should now be considered likely to fail, unless it failed WELL within the MTBF window.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Raid 5, in most applications means that if one drive fails you have no problems. If a second drive fails before the dead drive is replaced & rebuilt, you are screwed.
Raid 5 with spare(might be called 6 in some vendors terminology), is almost unseen outside the enterprise (read real raid controller, not home nas-box, or home-pc) means if one drive fails that drive will be rebuilt on the spare drive. If a second drive fails before that happens: HEHEHEHEHE (can you say $$$ to ontrack?)
In either case, a power-surge eating your controller will still shaft you. (You did purchase a second controller to sit on the shelf didn't you? Oh, you were using the controller on your motherboard. pffft. and no, it's not raid 6 unless you are a geek running Linux to handle the raid bits.)
There is a reason specialized backup devices exist. Recommended is still off site storage (tape recommended, HD sometimes used.) so if a fire eats your server (farm if you have one) - you still have your data. If you fall down, and want to get back up - you need backup.
Note: (I'm poor and only have a single drive NAS-box with duplicate data. I'm hoping that if it goes down, I can replace it before the machines with the data die. Or vice-versa)
Note2: It's 90 outside & my DSL bridge just melted. I'm cranky and need to get it out of my system before I go to client meeting this afternoon.)
Get 2 drives, put one in an external enclosure and leave it off when not backing up/restoring. It's not a perfect substitute for tapes, but should be good enough for home use.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
RAID is not a backup. Say it with me. RAID is not a backup.
/", it won't save you if your power supply dies in an ugly way and takes all your attached components with it, your power line gets hit by lightening, and fries everything attached to that outlet, your house/biz gets burgled and they take the computer, you accidently delete a critical file you really need or realize you need it later, etc, etc, etc.
Not only won't RAID save you from a "rm -rf
RAID is not a backup.
A backup is an offline copy that you can store at an off-site location just in case one of many many 'bad things' happen.
RAID is simply a way of increasing your uptime in case a single component fails. It's not a backup.
Some of the newer 7200.9 models (80gb, 120gb, and 160gb) also feature the perpendicular technology. I'd like to see a comparison between these and the older 7200.9 models that don't feature it.
Mirroring provides redundancy, but not a backup. If anything happens to the box itself or the building it's stored in (e.g. a fire), you're still screwed.
You're right. Its so important to have offsite backups for reliability.
Think about it. If you're diligent about it, and take offsite backups from your house to your work or neighbors or whatnot, when you're house burns down you can still have all of your MP3s, TV shows, and everything!
The bitch is that you forgot to do redundancy and offsite backups of your couch, TV, computer, stereo, wife, kids, and pets.
Any modern nForce4-based motherboard handles raid arrays on 4 SATA drives, any additional chip is gravy (my 1 year old DFI handles 4 form the nForce plus 4 from a Promise chip)
This is perhaps the case. I don't use modern motherboards and processors for home file servers. Old stuff works fine -- but suffers from the drive controller capacity limitations.
Seven or eight drives won't strain a PSU (unless it's a cheap no-brand piece of crap)
My experience is different. I had a decent (but non-server) 350W PSU and when I added the fifth drive to my box I began getting intermittent failures reported by the drives. When pushing all of the drives hard, the failures were frequent and sever. I put a good 550W PSU in the box and the problems went away.
Cooling is likewise, while hard drives don't cool very well (they don't have heatsinks or anythink) they produce very few heat, just put a low-speed 120mm fan (low speed as in under 1kRPM, I'm talking Papst or Nexus here) in front of your drives (a fan for each 3 or 4 drives) and they'll keep well under 40C in a room at 25C.
But only if your case has airflow that is designed for that many drives. My case doesn't, and most cases not specifically designed for lots of drives don't, so they end up being placed in all sorts of odd locations, which means that cooling becomes problematic.
So, to sum up, if you're (a) using a newish motherboard, (b) a PSU designed for server, or at least high-end workstation use and (c) a case designed to hold and cool lots of drives, then you don't have any of the problems I mentioned, because you've already bought the components to solve them. If you're building a home file server the way most people do, though, out of the machine that was your desktop box several years ago, they're real problems.
Some controllers are also able to extend (or even fully replace) arrays out of the box. You usually don't find them on consumer-grade motherboards though.
Not to mention the fact that if you use hardware RAID you're tied to that particular hardware's implementation of RAID. If that controller dies (unlikely, but possible), you need to replace it with the same sort of controller. For a data center that's not an issue, since you just purchase a service contract that ensures the components will be replaced as needed. For my home use situation, it make me nervous to tie my data to any particular controller. Software RAID is the safer bet.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
I can tell from the tone of this review that a lot of pointy-haired purchasing managers are going to be dying to use these for enterprise database applications. I can feel the tense discussions coming on strong now.
That's why I posted the following manifesto: 750G Disks are BAHD for DBS a few weeks ago when these disks were released. Find out why huge disks are the bane of DBAs everywhere. My manifesto has been signed by the Oracle DBA industry's leading lights, please, use these disks for the purpose they were designed for, whatever that may be (home movies from your Canon S2 IS? I've got one of those and the on-board video compression is TERRIBLE!), and not for databases.
This public service announcement has been brought to you by Pythian Remote DBA.
--
Paul Vallee
President, The Pythian Group, Inc.
The real Paul Vallee is slashdot userid 2192, and, what do you mean it's not cool to point out your low userid?
Only $440 from NewEgg.Com with 3-day shipping.
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Oil companies which do a lot of Pre-Stack processing, i.e. raw seismic data, need an awful lot of disk storage: We're currently in the ~50 TB (geographically mirrored RAID5 servers) range, and this is with Post-Stack only.
a beast.html enclosure results in about 27-28 TB of usable disk space in a single 4U rack unit.
Going to Pre-Stack will generate 10 to 100 times as much data, which means that 500 TB to multi-PB is where we'll be in a couple of years. Having 750 GB SATA drives in a Nexsan SATABeast http://nexsan.com/products/products/satabeast/sat
Very nice!
Terje
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
I remember when DBAs were screaming that they only wanted 1 and 2gb disks and as many spindles as possible, and at that time, it was the 9gb SCSI drives that were BAD because they we too big and people wanted more spindles
Then the DBAs wanted to horde 9gb drives because 36gb drives were too large and they wanted as many spindles as possible.
Now DBAs only want the 72gb drives because the 144s and 250s are too large and they want as many spindles as possible
I guarantee that a few years from now, we'll read about the DBAs wanting only 750gb drives because the 3tb drives are too large and they want as many spindles as possible
One thing I noticed is that one of the photos shows the sticker on the drive and it includes a warning that the warranty is voided if the drive experiences greater than 350 Gs !! Can this drive really survice a 340 Gs impact ? I am not a scientist nor a mathematician but that sounds like a hell of a shock.
Can any Slashdotter convert 350 Gs to real world units (eg dropped 5m onto concrete) ?
How about a DLT-S4 tape then. They hold 800GB of data native. At no time to the best of my knowledge in the last 10 years has the largest hard drive ever held more than the largest tape. Before that I don't know.
Yes they are expensive, but that is because people don't backup so the volumes are to small. Chicken and egg situtuation really. Only something like two million DLT drives of all types have ever shipped. In the same period it is probably more like two billion hard drives that have shipped. Hard drives are so cheap because the volumes are there to make it so.
I actually just implemented a DVD-based backup solution for my employer. While DVDs are much smaller than tapes, they're much cheaper, especially when buying in bulk. They're so cheap, in fact, that we can afford to do nothing but level-0 backups, which eliminates a great deal of complexity. We deal with the optical degradation problem by using error-correcting codes to gaurantee against the loss of one disc from any given backup set --- and we usually make multiple sets anyway. All in all, it's not a terrible system.