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The First Terabyte Hard Drive Reviewed
mikemuch writes "ExtremeTech has a review and benchmarks of the Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 1TB Hard Drive, which ushers in the terabyte age. It performs well on HDTach and PCMark benchmarks, though not as speedily as professional-grade drives. It could be just the ticket for digital media junkies. 'One of the first issues to note is that you may not see an actual one terabyte capacity on your system. First, the formatted capacity is always less than the raw space available on the drive. Directory information and formatting data always take up some space. Second, the hard drive industry's definition of a megabyte differs from the rest of the PC business. One megabyte of hard drive space is 1,000,000 bytes: 10^6 bytes. Operating systems calculate one megabyte as 2^20 bytes, or 1,048,576 bytes. Once installed and set up, Hitachi's 1TB hard drive offers up an actual formatted capacity of about 935GB, as measured by the OS. That's still a lot of space, by anyone's definition.'" Update: 05/17 21:52 GMT by Z : Adding '^s' missing from article.
If you're going to give a condescending explantion of how hard drive space is measured ("News For Nerds"), at least get it right.
We all have our own opinions about Slashdot editors, but it's hard to believe Zonk even read the summary. It's nonsense.
"that's still a lot of space, by anyone's definition"
I said that when I got my first 6Gb drive a decade ago - that was a hell of a step up from 200Mb - now it wouldn't even fit a quarter of my mp3's on it!
So that I can fill this new drive with pr0n ;)
What do the 106 bytes and 220 bytes in the summary mean?
I understand that hard drive makers use powers of 10 in preference to powers of 2 and it's a coincidence that 2^10 is close to 10^3, but the summary makes no sense as it stands.
>One megabyte of hard drive space is 1,000,000 bytes: 106 bytes. Operating systems calculate one megabyte as 220 bytes, or 1,048,576 bytes
ok I may be drunk but WTF is this all about? are there operating systems that randomly think a megabyte is 220 bytes or nearly 5000 times more?
For anyone confused by the summary: a hard-disk-maker's megabyte is 10^6 (1 million) bytes, whereas an operating system's megabyte is 2^20 (1,048,576) bytes. The summary was supposed to use a superscript, but the superscript got lost so '10 to the 6th' became '106'.
Operating systems calculate one megabyte as 220 bytes, or 1,048,576 bytes.
I see, so one byte is 4766.2545 bytes?
Is there anyone out there who would be buying a 1TB hard drive who doesn't already know the difference between binary and decimal prefixes? I think their target market is well aware of the differences between GiB and GB.
Actually, it seems some Microsoft programmers still don't know the difference. At least most open source apps properly distinguish between binary and decimal prefixes. Not so for Windows...
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Article summary should read 10^6 bytes, not 106, and similarly 2^20 not 220.
Don't complain about the fact a megabyte isn't what you thought it was. Complain about the fact the industry still uses it for labels. But don't try and make the megabyte a mebibyte.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix vs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Si_prefix
when mounted, we want to to say 1 terrabyte, not meh, nearly one terrabyte. The OS is the measureing stick, use it.
I sure as hell don't want it to say 106 bytes.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Where nobody R's the TFA but instead spends their time making fun of the summary.
"Once installed and set up, Hitachi's 1TB hard drive offers up an actual formatted capacity of about 935GB"
I'm sorry I can't pull a specific link for you, but if you go look at the reviews of 500gb drives on Newegg or Outpost or other online sites...
You'll find reviews that say "Only got 450 gigs on my 500 gig drive but it's close enough, I give it 3 stars!"
did you put my cat in the sink you know he doesn't like sinks whats wrong with you
But it's still not big enough to hold my pr0n collection.
Nothing sucks like a Vax, nothing blows like a PowerMac G4
I remember when I was 9 or 10 and the family computer could hold 10 gigs. That was nearly unfillable at the time.
Sorry, just being nostalgic.
"Banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies." -Thomas Jefferson
Maxtor does (did?) it slightly better. For their 320/300 GB drive, they called it 300+20 GB. Formatted capacity? 298 GB. *thumbs up*
Can someone decipher that sentence for me? 1MB = 220 bytes? Eh? Is Westmoreland in charge of OS byte definitions?
(sorry for tagging along on your post... it was reasonably close to the top...
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
I fervently agree! I didnt have a 75GXP, but I've seen too many of the "DeathStar" line die while on service calls. Rebrand FTW, Hitachi.
_____^_-________ Fus Was Here
I know the difference, but I still fall for it!
It's like those 49.99 prices that somehow computes in your brain to $40.
With 1TB being 0.93TB the slack is actually becoming quite large. I remember when I thought 70GB was enormous, and now that just a rounding error? Damn, I'm going to be pissed the next time I fall for it. Just like I was when I lost 35GB on my current drive... damn I'm pissed again.
Initial review March 19th:
9 49
9 49
9 74
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2
Follow-up RAID performance April 19th:
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2
Follow-up to the follow-up April 23rd:
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
"If you're going to give a condescending explantion of how hard drive space is measured ("News For Nerds"), at least get it right."
Would you like to hear the condescending explaination of economics ("New for Economists")? Lord know slashdot usually doesn't get that right.
Come on, look what you're pasting. What you thought was a story about ponies could be the next AACS encryption key!
Wow, I love ponies.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken.
I just vi /dev/sda
Deleted
I remember when I paid $150 for a 10meg MFM drive! (poke c800:50 ;)
I remember paying $1000 for my first 1gig drive!
I remember paying $500 for my first 1TB of drive space (6x300gb drives ok 1.8TB unformatted)
I remember paying $350 for my second 1.1TB of drive space (4x320gb Just last week)
I can not wait to get to my first 6TB system! I may have said, many years ago, that I would never fill 1gig, but I know I can fill 6TB It should not take me more than a couple of months.
Man how things have changed!
Then 8mhz, 640k ram and 10megs.
Now 2.4Ghz dual core, 2gig ram, 1.1TB HD
I wonder what we will say in another 16 years.
This 1TB drive has now finally earned the it's name "Deathstar"....
1,000,000,000,000 bytes / 1024^4 = 931.23 GB formatted. Math is our friend.
We can only guess what Zonk meant to say. But I'll try to make some sense.
First, hard drive manufacturers have always calculated drive space differently than the rest of the entire computing world. It allows them to say that a drive is bigger than it really truly is. They've been able to do it for years, and lawsuits have been lost and won on this very issue. But essentially, their use of the metric words "kilo," "mega," and "giga" are the literal meanings of "1000," "1,000,000" and "1,000,000,000" instead of the computing world's 1024 multiplier.
Therefore, a "kilobyte" to them is 1,000 bytes (as opposed to 1,024 bytes in real life), and a "megabyte" is "1,000,000" bytes (as opposed to 1,048,576 bytes [1024 x 1024]), and a "gigabyte" is 1,000,000,000 bytes (instead of 1,073,741,824 [1024 x 1024 x 1024] bytes in real life).
The real difference in a terabyte? Divide 1,000,000,000,000 by 1024/1024/1024 and you get 931.32 gigabytes. That's a theoretical limit, mind you, and there is overhead for cluster size, partition info, FAT tables, etc., so you really don't even get that.
Doesn't that byte?
"They said I probly shouldn't fly with just one eye," "I am Bender. Please insert girder."
Apparently, their publishing system doesn't support tags (or [sup] if it's BBCode based).
The thing was supposed to be 10<sup>g</sup> and 2<sup>20</sup> which should render 10^6 and 2^20 (slashdot doesn't allow sup tags neither... but you got the point).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
The article author failed to mention: when formatted, this drive is actually only about 400GB. /end sarcasm
hmm. I guess you could say that "935GB ought to be enough for anybody".
Note to future self: remember when 1 terabyte was considered a lot of storage? those were the days....
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
Perhaps the next story on Bill Gates or windows might consist mostly of a paragraph explaining that Microsoft is a company.
Cue the ensuing Mebi/Gibi/Tebi vs. SI notation fights.
While it's takes a while to get used to it, I actually prefer the Bi-units now. 4,3GiB or 4,7GB is already a huge difference when talking about DVD capacity. At terabyte, it gets enormous.
Linux already uses those units.
Only place where I still see a purpose for using binary units in computing is memory - address bus is still addressed exactly with n lines so memory capacity will be 2^n. For all other cases, it's not needed. Yes, the hard drives have 512 to 4096 byte sectors, but who cares when were talking about trillions of them?
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix for more.
While I know that most folks like the faster larger disks, the truth is that these are NOT used in most businesses. Many business will use >= 10K, SCSIed and raided (save the small ones). These will be used in home drives or as LARGE storage. It would make sense to have these spin at lower speeds to increase the MTBF. In particular, if these are raided, then you can get plenty of speed.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Finally! Enough space to install Windoze Vista SuperUltimate Edition with SuperBloat64 and added memory mismanagement!
Ok, might as well ask here since i havnt been able to get a good answer anywhere else... I just built a server last week, its an empty case pretty much, just a spare drive for the OS and some storage, with 8 free drive bays, i want maximum storage density, so im waiting for 1TB HDs in the $250 price range... I've got a PCI-E slot for a controller card and you can get an 8 port one for about $300, but i've read that the maximum you can format an array to in windows is about 2TB. I'd prefer to have everything in a RAID5 for a single 7TB array, is there any way to do this with windows, or am i going to need smaller arrays at the expense of more parity drives? :(
And yes it has to be windows, network DVD player software, sharing, etc.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
..the drive crashes or dies.
I thought losing 80GBs of data was bad.
But ~1TB of data is just too much information to lose at one time, for me.
"Update: 05/17 21:52 GMT by Z : Adding '^s' missing from article."
WTF? now we can't pretend it wasn't a mistake and make fun of the 'stupid' submitter. Curse you!
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Hitachi probably say all the recent AACS compromises and thought "Well, people are obviously going to need more hard drive space now". Hitachi have their finger on the pulse :)
These have been in the hands of the testers a while (see date from blog below). As my friend puts it, it's 'geek porn' at this point. We all want to have the latest and greatest, but then.. so does the industry....
e k_p0rn_how_big_is_your_drive
http://www.karan.org/blog/index.php/2007/03/30/ge
How about some purchasing math?
Just went to Newegg to check on this. Drive is selling for $600, not the $400 the article mentioned. Zipzoomfly has it for $500 but it's out of stock. CDW has it for $450. (Anyone have better hardware buying sources?)
Just below the Hitachi 1TB were the 500Gb drives at ~$150 each. Let's see if I have $600 and the right system to support it, would I take a single 1TB drive or take 4x 500Gb drives and put them in a RAID 5 giving me 1.5TB and faster read speed (if the data is well distributed)? Hmmm
I guess I'm not as much of a geek as I used to be. I don't download very much, I don't rip CDs or DVDs and I don't do much with graphics. I'm guessing the 320Gb I just got in February will last me quite a while. I'll wait for the 2TB drives and the SATA 5 throughput, thank you very much.
In other news, Seagate announced that its upcoming line of hard drives will be measured using the new LoC (Library of Congress) storage units to avoid confusion. The advanced ST-54883432, weighing in at a monstrous .00000000000017 LoC, goes on sale June 14th.
I realize this is /. and all, but still it is a bit disconcerting to see an interesting article only to find out that all the highly modded comments detail the typos in the summary :D
Hard drive makers, stop the lies. Time to measure gigabytes like the rest of the industry counts them. If not now, how long before a 1GB DIMM is 1,000,000,000 bytes? Fire your marketing droids who insist that everyone buys their lies, and get honest with us. It ain't a TB until I can record an honest TB worth of data on it!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Anandtech reviewed this drive a month ago .
Though I seem to remember reading that it was an OEM Sample from dell using 200 GB platters, and that by the retail launch they would be using larger(320 GB?) platters. That is why they posted it, right? Retail launch? It better be, otherwise, they're in for (more of) a flaming.
Typo Flame..........check
Not News Flame...check
Dupe Flame.........missing
Almost there guys, need a little help though.
df . /data
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb1 961432072 221096 912372976 1%
I can't help but feel cheated deep down when a gigabyte on the box is not a gigabyte in my PC. I know the numbers, I know the reasoning but wouldn't it be all much easier if we fixed one or the other ? Hard drives are sold in decimal gigabytes, so why does all the software report in gibibytes ? It's obvious that the easy solution would be to use gibibytes everywhere, since it's easier to change the printing on a box than it is to fix all the software in the world. Especially as sizes increase and the differential grows quite large, this becomes rather important.
I'm sure anyone who's ever been in a retail situation has had to deal with the ignorant yet logical customer that demanded a 7% refund on their undersized hard drive. In the case of this terabyte drive, we're talking about 70 gigabytes. Most people don't even have 70gb worth of data on their PC (excluding file hoarders)... that is one big marketing discrepancy. The bigger the gap, the louder and more frequently the ignorants will complain.
How hard is it, really, to just quote the proper number ? Or maybe just increase the actual capacity by 7% to avoid printing an odd number like 931gb.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
One of the first issues to note is that you may not see an actual one terabyte capacity on your system. First, the formatted capacity is always less than the raw space available on the drive.
I think the only people who don't know this by now are elderly british judges.
Hey, I'm 21 and *I* thought "man I'm old". My first comp had a 500MB HD (I remember getting our first cd drives in the house and being amazed that the discs held more than my HD). We had far older machines in the house at the time too. My SE has this gigantic outboard scsi disk on it right now that holds a whopping 20MBs,and we had several older machines both at home and at school that used 2 floppies and no HD :-p.
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
Specially if you consider that 65GB is actually 6.5% of the disk size.
On the other hand, that is the final filesystem space, and not the diskspace itself.
The actual size difference between base 10 and base 2 would be 99511627776. That is a 9% difference. Meaning that a 1TB disk (931.32GiB) is 9% smaller than a 1TiB disk.
This binary prefix nonsense is just another example of marketing-speak intruding into long established standards, in a way for the vendors to sell less for more.
morcego
My first drive was an 8" floppy that held about 175KB, my first hard drive was 5MB (that's right, megabytes).
In a country, that still measures pressure in pounds per square inch (pounds being pounds of force, of course — unbeknown to most), both gigi and giga are quite scientific and engineeringly sound.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I will gleefully switch from using 2^x for kilo, mega, giga, terra, and others when the hard drive manufacturer switch from using 2^3 for bytes instead of 10^1 for bytes. After all shouldn't we be using SI all the way? Why not have a decibyte or a centibyte or a millibyte?
Most of us are smart enough to buy drives based on gb/$ ratio.
:)
Apparently most of us are stupid enough to waste endless time debating the concept of a gigabyte too
It's been a looong time, but I'm positive the manufactures used to use 2^20, etc to calculate size. I remember reading in some article that a marketing droid found out they were doing this and started user 10 based counting to calculate drive size and all the other manufacturers jumped in. This was all ten or fifteen years ago. I may have to drag out an old ST-251 and check sizes. Any older slashdotters remember it being this way too?
I'm planning on building a multi-terabyte RAID5 for my home out of these some time in the next couple months. Now the big question is how I'll make backups. I'm thinking of just using a couple spare 1TB drives as external hdds or maybe making a spare RAID5 in a Mini-ITX case so I can port it around as my external hdd.
:)
:)
I'd like to do a 6TB RAID5 but I'll probably end up with two RAID5's with three 1TB disks each so that I can make my backups.
I don't know about in 16 years but I bet within 10 we're talking about the first petabyte drives. I know I'll be able to fill those up too. I could do it now if I could afford to buy the drives and the infrastructure needed to support them.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
You mean the first INTERNAL 1Tb drive. That's a lot different that the first one in general.
I remember 160K floppy drives which cost well over NZ$500 (and NZ$10 per disk) and a 5M hard drive was probably over NZ$5000 (I wasn't in the market for one) and hundreds of dollars for a 16K memory upgrade. (I.e. my computing memories go back to about 1980.)
There are others here who will remember when a 5M hard drive was the size of a washing machine and more expensive than a luxury car*, and when having 8k of memory meant you had a main-frame.
* And you could race hard drives - although somewhat slower than the car.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
mod parent insightful.
7 5gxp_the_pain_continues/
IBM's appalling, much malfunctioning Deskstar HDDs ended with IBM quitting the HDD business. Many lost data (including me!) Worse, IBM knew the DeskStar line was faulty, and continued selling them anyway and denied there was a problem. http://consumeraffairs.com/news03/ibm_drives.html IBM quit the business and sold to Hitachi who didn't even think to change the charred brand name. I wouldn't touch anything from that lineage. The Hard Drive is the most important part of your PC to take the chance: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/10/24/deskstar_
And TFA claimed that the $400 price tag made it the most expensive desktop drive to date.... Says a lot about the quality of reporting on ExtremeTech (though Bill Machrone was usually pretty sharp). Heck, I paid $600 for a 80MB IDE drive in 1990 and thought it was a good price (to replace a CDC Wren IV on my Compaq).Still weird to think that the Hitachi drives stores 12K times what the Conner Peripheral's drive held in the same form factor.
Wasn't this reviewed 2 months ago by AnandTech?
"Hitachi's 1TB hard drive offers up an actual formatted capacity of about 935GB"
(clears throat)
NOT GOOD ENOUGH!
I WANT 1TB OF FORMATTED SPACE. AND I DON'T MEAN THOSE GIRLYMAN GIGS YOUR MARKETING DRONES HAVE BEEN TRYING TO PAWN OFF ON ME.
thank you.
banale 640k and balmer chair throwing jokes could that thing hold, cover what's important to slashdorks!!
Despite all the jokes about pr0n and large amounts of storage, my MythTV system is testament that that's not necessarily so. High-definition recordings take about 7.5GB per hour and I can record four at once (two from cable over FireWire and two from ATSC over-the-air).
One of the two RAID arrays I devote to MythTV recordings is built around a 16 drive-bay 4U server case with a quad-core processor and RocketRAID 2240 controller card (just for JBOD; I use software RAID 6) inside. The bays are all full in terms of physical disks and almost so in terms of data, and I'm thinking about building another array. I neither need nor want another full-fledged server, though; the 16-bay server already has plenty of leftover horsepower and internal-bus bandwidth. I really just need a box with empty drive bays, ideally at least eight.
Am I correct in believing that I could get an eight-bay enclosure, put another RocketRAID 2240 (or something cheaper if possible; I don't need the hardware-RAID functionality) in the 16-bay server, connect the server and enclosure with two multiband SATA/"Infiniband" cables, and be up and running with capacity left over on the card for another such enclosure add-on down the road?
The Hitach is a 1000mb drive with 5x200gb platters.
The Seagate (due soon) is a 1000mb drive with 4x250gb platters and (iirc) 32mb of cache.
The increased platter density will slightly increase performance and theoretically decrease cost, it'll slightly reduce heat and also power use too.
On top of this Seagate offer a 5 year warranty on all drives (Hitachi may also, sorry not sure) and Seagate used to be one of the quietest available to boot. (although I hear the 7200.10's suck for noise, apparently some kind of patent issue with using low acoustic mode - hope that's sorted?)
Anyhow, what this does mean for us end users is you'll see 2 platter, 500gb drives which weigh less, cost less, run faster and cost substantially less than the 1000mb models, also the glorious 750gb will become a 3 platter model instead of a 4 platter (my personal 'limit' is 3playtters - after that I find it too prone to noise / heat / failure rate)
I'd say we'll see 80$ (rebate) 500gb drives within 3 months and we'll see the 750's at 169$ or something soon(ish)
I have 4 TB right now for my media center on a total of 9 drives. C'mon I have to store all my Star Trek's, Galactica, etc... somewhere! However, all these drives make a lot of heat. My office regularly goes over 85f.
I should get a few of these (rubbing hands)
Western Digital My Book Premium II 1TB External Hard Drive
Western Digital My Book Pro II 1TB External Hard Drive
Fantom G-Force MegaDisk 1TB External Hard Drive
Just bought 300TB of storage with 750GB drives: if I'm lucky, this might last until these 1TB drives are shipping in quantity in a few months....
We all know what we'll fill these with...
pr0n!
To be honest, I didn't know what it was.
I figured it was some pr0n term, like "Giggity-byte".
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
Except only computer people use those units. SI prefixes are factors of 10^x where x is an integer (typically a multiple of 3)
This standard has been in place for far longer than the "binary" prefixes, yet computer people continue to assert their use. As convenient as powers-of-two are for operating systems, is it really convenient enough to muddy up perfectly good standard prefix definitions. Ironic that most of these people are metric supremacists when it comes to physical units...
So the question is, who is the scummiest, HDD manufacturers who use the overall more standard standard, which happens to over represent their capacity in a world where software distributors typically use a common-to-the-field standard which happens to under represent their requirements?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Here in the states Wal-mart never prices anything $4.95 or $4.95 because everyone is so used to it they just round up anyway. Instead what they do is make it an even $5 and advertise it as 2 for $10. Or like you said they make it some odd number like $4.23
"106" bytes should have been written as "10^6 bytes", and "220 bytes" should be "2^20 bytes". Either that or actually put the powers in superscripts.
Captain, it does not always compute.
How about 10**6 and 2**20 ?
- Ze Laws ov Termodynamics? BAH!
Kelvin vas a fool!
Mit Hydrogen + Pinoqachole ve can break zes laws anytime!
"One terabyte should be enough for anybody."
I'm a 3D graphics artist (broadcast animation for the History Channel), and I assure you, I could fill a 10-terabyte RAID with HD-resolution image sequences faster than you'd imagine.
FLOPs are Hz. Hz is a time unit, and has nothing to do with the reasoning why data structures in computers are measured in 2^20 increments.
The logic is:
* If you're counting something in IT which has a physical SI basis (time) then you're using SI prefixes when you say kilo and mega. I.E. Mbps.
* If you're counting something in IT which is purely a software construct, and specifically you are talking about a size requirement, then you're using the "computer" prefixes when you say kilo and mega.
So, long story short:
kilobytes = 1024. Megabytes = 1024^2. And so forth.
DATA SIZING ONLY. NO MIXING WITH SI-UNITS UNLESS YOU CLARIFY. That means if you want to represent the speed of transfer between hard drives in 2^20-sized units per second, you write MiB/s to avoid confusion. And LO, that is standard practice.
But a 4KB sector size means 4096, and NOTHING ELSE. 4KiB or what the fuck ever makes no sense. The point of using shorthand like that is to reduce the required precision to jot down something precisely. And in the computer software domain, values like 1kb, 4kb, 1MB are actually important that they mean what we "know" them to mean. Addressing block offsets in a database, making sure your table extent sizes add up to the size of the files containing them... just use the one unit that is going to not require extra precision in the preferred multiples of the units and such! Imagine trying to deal with that if it was 4.1kb and 1.05MB and do they add up to my file size usage of 262MB or do I have round-off error?
EVERYTHING ELSE (kilo*, mega*) involving computers is 10^3, 10^6, etc. Megahertz, kilo-baud, they are all base 10 without question.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
My worst experience has been with Western Digital. I have a large stack of dead WD drives where I work; one of them went blooey just after its one-year warranty expired.
More recently at home, one of four Samsung 120GB SATA drives in a Linux software RAID-5 array bit the dust. Hmm... just after the three-year warranty expired. What a coincidence! Fortunately, the array kept on chugging along in degraded mode without skipping a beat, and I quickly took the opportunity to back it up - restoring the contents onto a 3x500GB RAID-5 array of Seagate drives.
For huge storage, I'll stick with three or four disks in a RAID-5 rather than buy one giant drive. A small number of drives in RAID-5 give enough redundancy to provide time to replace a drive or migrate the data.
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
Gigabyte doesn't mean anything else beyond 1024^3 because you never need to measure storage in units other than powers of two, because of the memory addressing limitation.
I mean, the 2TB limit of SCSI LUNs is 2*1024^4, not 2 * 1000^4. So that 1024GB = 1TB is very, very important in that respect.
There is NO REASON for a gigabyte = 1000^3 bytes to exist at all. So why introduce a prefix that is only ever used for bytes, especially when the base-10 prefix is NEVER used for the same purpose?
Why do we have to change our order-of-magnitude prefix based on context, and choke out poorly-stressed pseudo-latin prefixes that make us sound even more like properllerheads?
It's just not right. No amount of wishing the word means something other than what we already agree it to mean is going to change anything.
And the only time when the unit causes confusion is when you try to use those size quantities in mixed representations with SI units, like time.
And the rule there is to either go with the proposed SI units IN THAT CIRCUMSTANCE, to avoid confusion, or even better:
Use scientific notation and base units drop the SI prefix OR
Use a telco-specific term... multiply the base-10 value by 8 and call it "baud" OR
Use base-10 SI prefixes and change "bytes" to "octects"
Octects are bytes represented "outside" of the computer without underlying assumptions to medium, and so base-2 addressing requirements are not necessary, and so normal SI prefixes make sense.
Furthermore octects are encoding independant... a conversion from apparent MiB/s at a software interface into megaoctects per second over the wire could take into account 10-bit octects and other strangeness that would cause greater disparity than just 1024^2 vs one million
So it's partly an aspect of UNITS.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
And when we deal with memory system, base-10 doesn't make sense anymore. And we don't say "octets", we say "bytes".
So one giga-octect = 1000^3 octects
And one gigabyte = 1024^3 bytes
That's it. End of story.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I want giant HDs for my media collection. But I don't need them to be fast, because I just want to play them at the media rates (or a small multiple, if I'm sharing with some friends in realtime).
The files are stored in long stretches of sequential sectors, and don't change much. The drives don't multiplex between more than one (or maybe a few) file.
So 5400 RPM, 20ms access, little or no cache - just the cheapest TB drives. So I can fill the maximum devices my cheap, slow motherboard supports (like 4 IDE, or maybe 2-4 SATA) with the biggest cheapest drives. Give me $0.10:GB, which stores 4 (FLAC) compressed CDs, or 25-50-100% of a movie. If 250GB drives with high performance sell for $0.25:GB, they should be able to give me the fat, slow drives cheap.
Then I'll have to buy 2 of them to RAID for performance and reliability. That's Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks.
--
make install -not war
No. Just please, leave.
What the fuck is wrong with people? You just learn the metric system? Got a stick up your ass?
Is there are problem with 4KB being an even multiple of a HD sector (512 bytes)? Is that A FUCKING PROBLEM FOR YOU?
Oh wait, those of us who actually deal with these under-the-hood type issues actually HAVE PRETTY FUCKING GOOD REASONS for kilobyte to be different than kilobaud. You can go back to playing with photoshop and jerking off onto your blog, where you'll complain about god knows what else, you fucking technocrati.
KILO IS AN ORDER OF MAGNITUDE MEASURE FROM LATIN!
GET OVER YOURSELF
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I mean... do you have exactly 1024 gigabyte-sized objects you need to exactly fit on your hard drive?
Of course not.
The abuse-of-SI prefix business shouldn't surprise anyone, IMHO. Every box has that little "*" next to the size and the units below.
And some manufacturers are realizing that at GB sizes and up, that discrepancy is getting large enough to be complain-aboutable, and they are now advertising the "real" size (or showing both on the box with equal billing).
And if you needed that extra power-of-two scale factor wiggle room at the 1TB, buy four 300GB drives instead, and get the benefit of fewer-platters-per-drive, and more spindles.
Oh, don't forget to account for room for FS formatting and extent allocation slack.
And your swap file.
And room to defragment or move files around.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Come on, addressing limitations and disk block sizes are technical concepts that only technical people need to worry about. Let's take a simple talk that ordinary people face:
"will these files, 2.21 GB, 950 MB, 880 MB, 637 MB, fit on a DVD-R?"
In a metric world, we see on the box "DVD-R 4.7 GB" and computes 2210+950+880+607 = 4647 < 4700, yes it should fit.
In a power-of-two world, even assuming that the disks are labeled "4.37 GiB", we're in for some awkward conversions akin to adding miles with feet. Now you tell me why the gymnasitic is worth it. In case the sum of lengths gets very close to the disc capacity? Tell your hunt to keep 1% slack on her DVD-R, she'll understand. Teach her about powers of 2 and block sizes and filesystem overheads, she won't.
Hitachi drives support AAM, enable this feature and the drive will become quieter at the expense of some performance.
The saddest poem
Perhaps 106 refers to the free space in bytes after installing Windows Vista Ultimate?
"I said that when I got my first 6Gb drive a decade ago - that was a hell of a step up from 200Mb - now it wouldn't even fit a quarter of my mp3's on it!"
;-)
Of course, *we*, your fellow slashdotters, know you meant 6GB legally owned mp3's - obviously, as no slashdotter would even dream of 'pirating' music...but is it really wise to say such things, when the RIAA might possibly be inclined to think otherwise?
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
Ultrium 3 tape backup 400/800 Gb (native/2:1compression) stated capacity holds circa 350 Gb (native)from NTFS drive.
This is more annoying to me than the Hard Drive issues... nothing worse than a few Mb left over on a job you thought would fit on one tape...
grrrr
With the ready availability of RAID cards and drivers, I wonder what the point of a terabyte drive at well above the current best cents-per-gigabyte pricing is.
This costs three times as much as a 500G drive for twice the capacity; all the reviews are pointing out that you'd want to run two drives in RAID1 because 900G of data loss from a single mechanical failure is unlikely to be acceptable; six 500G drives in RAID6 get you twice the capacity, more reliably, for the same price, three 500G drives in RAID5 get you the same capacity, similar reliability, half the price.
Yes, six drives are a little louder that two drives, but drives have been quieter than CPU/PSU fans for a long time now. I suppose some cases don't fit six drives very conveniently, but you can get quite a fancy case for $400.
I suppose there might be hosting situations in which the volume of two hard drives is worth $400.
When i was 9 or 10 my 386 had 20MB hard drive
"Drawing closer to world domination, keystroke by keystroke."
40 cents/gig? 500GB disks cost 20 cents/gig.
You were doing real well up until that. Unlike, say, RAM or hard disk space, communications technology is not fundamentally organized around groups of octets. Comm tech is all bit-based. POTS modems, Ethernet transceivers, DSLs, etc., all transmit bits. The numbers of octets transmitted per arbitrary-group-of-bits depends on things like framing, packet size, and protocol overhead, which can and does vary. For example, if you send a large quantity of data in 576-octet Ethernet packets, it will take longer than it would using 1518-octet packets. (This holds true even if you discount the headers, as you still have framing overhead).
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Most people I talk to seem to fall for these tricks at the gas station. When the prices read out $2.7499/gal, they will *always* talk about how they found gas for only $2.74 instead of the $2.75 I read it as. Of course, it's only a 1 cent difference, so it's just about pointless to care.
I find it annoying that they try to mislead people by using a different size standard for MB/GB. I wish people would demand a change. It would be nice to know that you're actually buying a megabyte.
* If you're counting something in IT which has a physical SI basis (time) then you're using SI prefixes when you say kilo and mega. I.E. Mbps.
.25 units. Give me a third of a unit.. Uh, oh... 3.333333333 units. It looks like Pentium math, for heaven's sakes. This is why it still predominates in construction. Base-12 handles halves, thirds, quarters very nicely, though 5ths, 7ths, 9ths and 11ths are repeating. It's a matter of what people use most often.
It's even hard to argue that time has a base-10 underpinning - base-12 works much better for time - 60x60x24 is 50x50x20, etc. Our time system works out really, really, amazingly, well to describe the motion of our planet.
A few thousand years ago some Arabs (or were they Persians?) came up with with a positional number system which beat the pants off of what the Romans had come up with. They decided to make it based on the number of fingers they had on their hands. That was their mistake - it's probably easier to learn as a small child, but after that it's all harder.
Base-10 is hard to work with. Give me a quarter of a unit. OK,
Now the idea of a metric system being based on recurring multiples of the same base is very useful. Feet to miles isn't sensible, but 12*12*12 is almost a third of a mile, that would make a fine unit. 10*10*10*10*10 is nice - only 12*12*12*12*12 would be nicer.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
should have gone with better names, like:
1: Rogue (Apprentice)
2: Footpad
3: Cutpurse
4: Robber
5: Burglar
6: Filcher
7: Sharper
8: Magsman
9: Thief
10: Master Thief
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"And then the tags got stripped somehow."
When did slashdot get strippers?
10**6
10^6
Eh, close enough. To be fair, I should have just said 106 and 220 to begin with.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Odd... Every bit of HTML I attempted to use didn't render. Fun. I understand that SUP isn't an allowed tag, but I though A was...
Anyways, here's some of it again:
http://www.google.com/search?q=10**6
http://www.google.com/search?q=10%5E6
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
I agree, at least with the spindle speed. 20ms access and little/no cache not so much. Anyway, slower spindle speed means less heat, less power, longer life. And when you've got a RAID, you end up with fast reads anyway!
Also I'm not concerned with cost. From my POV, even $0.40/g is worthwhile since its high density storage. It means I can pack 2TB usable space via a RAID 5 in a mid-size tower along with either a separate system disk or an optical drive. If you want inexpensive, just wait a couple months and go for the 500's or 750s which should fall in price fairly quickly. Also on the topic of price, these prices are incredible when you compare them to enterprise drives. Its definitely consumer tech even if the price feels high.