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."

Comments

The justification for more space

[Dude McDude]

One word: PORN

Re:The justification for more space

[I Like Pudding]

I wonder if there is a correlation between hard drive size and blindness

Get perpendicular :D

[LiquidCoooled]

http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/research/recording_h ead/pr/PerpendicularAnimation.html

Watch out for the superparamagnetic effect though.

Re:Get perpendicular :D

[edzillion]

Did you notice that the ipod-like mp3 player the character was holding said 1 of 30,000 songs. 30 thousand! Does anyone else get the feeling of overload with this avalanche of content? I have noticed that the more music I have ripped on my pc the less I listen to each song. If consumers are said to empathise with their purchases - for instance it has been noted that people value items more when they own them - then having 30k songs or 50k episodes of the daily show surely means that each will get less attention. In these circumstances I find it hard to believe that these items will still hold their value.

Re:Get perpendicular :D

[WuphonsReach]

Well... 750GB (let's say 700GB once we remove the overhead) holds:

200 DVD movies (3.5GB each) or 100 DVD9 movies
500 days of music (128kbps)
1400 TV episodes (44 min, MPEG4)
500 HDTV episodes (MPEG4, 1.4GB/show)

So yes, we're probably getting past that point with music, but not with video yet.

And, IIRC, Project Gutenberg has something like 300-400GB of text files in their library.

Re:Big HUGE warnings

[Dan Ost]

No, this isn't true. If the failure rate of drives is constant (pretty close to reality), then
if you've got 7 drives and I've got 1, you're seven times more likely to lose a drive than
I am.

Granted, you only lose 1/7th if your drive fails, and I lose all of it, but since we're both
making backups (you ARE making backups, right?), you're paying 7 times the space, electricity,
heat, and noise costs for less reliable storage than I am. Assuming that we both run out systems
long enough for drives to fail, you're also paying 7 times as much of your time replacing drives
than I am.

What sense does that make?

only 187 million times cheaper per bit

[Ancient_Hacker]

$413 sounds a bit pricey, but then I thought back to my fiurst disk srive, a DEC DF-32. Only 32,768 12-bit words!

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% !

Bad math..

[JMZero]

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.

Re:That's a lot of DVDs

[ericdano]

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.

Re:Myth boxes and the like

[brianosaurus]

Geeks fit into hard drives like goldfish fit in bowls; they grow to fill the space...

Re:Scrambling?

[Fweeky]

Anything supporting LBA48 should handle it just fine, although we're rapidly approaching the 2TB limit many controllers have on a single disk/array. LBA48 supports drives up to 128PB (512 byte blocks * 2^48), but of course we're still in a largely 32bit world, so it's more like 512*2^32 unless you're careful.

High-definition MythTV box is *wonderful*

[Yeechang Lee]

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.

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!