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17 Serial ATA Hard Drives Compared
TheRaindog writes "The Tech Report has an in-depth look at Maxtor's DiamondMax 11 hard drive that provides some interesting insight on how Seagate's recent acquisition can improve deficiencies in its own drives. More valuable, however, is the fact that the review offers a detailed comparison of 17 different Serial ATA drives from Hitachi, Maxtor, Samsung, Seagate, and Western Digital. Performance is compared across a wide range of typical desktop, multitasking, and multi-user loads, and noise levels and power consumption tests also provide interesting results. Definitely worth a look for anyone in the market for a new hard drive."
These things are loud, especially under load. As quiet as rainfall and as loud as normal conversation?
No they're not really. As a recording engineer and programmer HD noise is a concern of mine. My system has 4x Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 and they really are quiet. I've used Barracudas for about 5 years now and this choice was based on HD noise figures from that time. 5 years ago the Barracudas were the quietist thing on the market and beat the competition hands down. Seems like now all the brands are pretty good - actually I'm pleasantly suprised how much improvement there's been judging by the figures. An increase of 3dB is not very much under load and nothing to get upset about. Some of my older drives would probably come in at 60-65dBA which was too loud. My PSU fan has to be the main culprit in any acoustic noise generated nowadays. As for the linked noise centre guides, these are the standard examples given everytime I've seen and there's no way the Barracuda 7200.9 is the same level as a normal conversation. To get this figure they probably average in all the normal silence of speech too I would guess. The band 50-60dBA is actually quite large in terms of SPL - every 6dB gain represents a doubling in power, every 12dB a quadrupling, so it's quite a big range.
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
Remember FLASH drives degrade with repeated use. Ok for a digital camera - you can only take photos so fast. But for your important data? NAH! Ok. Upto 30,000 time seems ok, but run FILEMON (sysinternals.com) and you'll be blown away how frequently Windoze writes to your hard drive. All those silly background agents that many programs insist on installing (usually in the tray too) sit there and write to your HDD every 15 seconds.
I'll take a reliable mechanical drive over a FLASH drive, thanks.
(PS. Thanks for choosing this Story. HDDs are important to geeks!!!!! Most important part of their PC really!!!!)
The standard isn't really going to make a difference. What matters is how good the processing device on the controller is and the read/write speeds of your drives. The SCSI array can be faster assuming it is set up correctly. Which one wins out will also be dependant on what type of environment you will be in. The premium on the SCSI hard drives themselves is justfied. Try looking for an comparison of SAS drives against SATA.
The purpose of language is communication, If the idea is clear the grammar ain't important
When shopping for an additional drive for my linux box a couple of months ago I went with a Barracuda 7200.9 because of its low noise and low power consumption. At the time I was comparing the .9 with the .10 and found that the .10 had a 30-40% higher power consumption at the same capacity.
I'm still amazed that the newer drive consumes much more power (and runs hotter in consequence) with not much benefits at the same capacity.
Markus
I work in a datacenter, for a company that has thousands and thousands of blades in our infrastructure. We primarily use HP blades, either the BL25p or the BL35p. One limitation of the BL35p is that the default configuration is SATA drives. The BL25p comes with SCSI.
The difference is very stark, in terms of drive failures. We have a seriously disproportionate number of SATA drives fail, to the point where we simply aren't buying BL35p's anymore with SATA, they're just not worth the extra hassle from drive failures.
I'll second that. SATA beats SCSI on price and capacity, yes. Maybe speeds are even, or almost, on a par. But there's no beationg of the SCSI reliability. PERIOD. :-( ). I have 10+ years old SCSI drives still spinning along happily. IDE from that time has long since died. Even 50% of much newer SATA drives ( 5 yrs old) have been replaced. And a 7 yr old U320 system still can compete with the newest SATA in speed.
I work in a heterogenous hardware environment (with just hundreds of drives, not thousands
But most importantly, the SATA drives in desktops are breaking down in droves when outside temp approaches 30 degrees celcius. And the 7 y old U320 SCSI is standing right next to them. Of course you pay a hefty premium for that reliability, but IMO that's worth it.