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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.
They mean that superscript tags don't work when submitting stories to slashdot. If should read 10^6 and 2^20.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
And then the tags got stripped somehow.
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"
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."
No, it isnt.
From a user perspective, it doesnt matter shit if a byte is 8 bit. That solves the whole "base 10" crisis you seem to have.
Next, gather your brain for some thought: you have a CPU that runs at some Ghz, and memory busses/network cards that run at megabyte/s.
Now guess what kind of "mega" those aspects used from the beginning of time? Yes, SI.
Just for some strage reason, for memory and disks people thought that 1024 is close enought to 1000 as not to matter.
Too bad now we are at 10^9 vs 2^30, where the relative differences arent ignorable anymore (8.5% is quite abit..)
Now the next problem with the binary idiociy in storage space is the plethora of bastardisations: People doing megabytes as 1000 kiB, or Gbyte as 1000 MiB, or 1000000 kiB, which all gives different results, of course...
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Yeah, say "kibibyte", "mebibyte", or "gibibyte" in any IT shop, and you WILL be called "faggot".
df . /data
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb1 961432072 221096 912372976 1%
My website on historical hard disk pricing shows that 10GB HDs were only sale roughly between 1998 and 2001. given the maximum extremes this puts the poster current age range between 15 to 20.
t ml
http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/harddiskdata.h
This page is great for when you want to date a hard disk or when a certain size disk first became available.
My first hard disk was on my Grog 1. It consisted of a large rock that was spun on a stone platter using a Dino-Drive(tm) and an irritable gorilla with a hammer and chisel for a read-write head. It held 40 bytes (because no-one would ever need more than 640 bits), was kind of slow and weighed a ton (sic) but hasn't lost a bit to this day. You had to take cover when it was writing to avoid the flying shards and, well, the dino and gorilla doo-doo kind of got on your shoes but was good for the garden.
Then there are those of us who remember when 1 gigabyte was considered a lot of storage.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I don't know about in 16 years but I bet within 10 we're talking about the first petabyte drives.
Moore's Law has been pretty accurate for drive capacities, so factor of 1000=10 doublings=15 years. I'd expect "only" 100TB drives in 10 years.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
Ever try to design a processor that uses 1000 byte pages? Good freaking luck.
No, but these guys did.
They still don't have it right because the gigabyte is 10^9 bytes, not 10^6. A gibibyte is 2^30 bytes, not 2^20 bytes.
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!
Ah, but you don't know the size in megs even with the metric prefixes. Well, maybe to the nearest meg, but not to the nearest kilobyte. The actual amount of storage used by that file is 123, 457, 024 bytes (assuming 512-byte allocation units). You can't realistically store a file using a fraction of a disk block, and thus, it is easy to be off far enough to round to a different kilobyte value, but people working in base 10 can't see that because they're playing fast and loose with the allocation units.
In more typical filesystems with 4k allocation units, it's 123,457,536 bytes. Your metric prefixes end up off by an entire k, and can be off by as much as 3k. 1000 byte units are an arbitrary division that inherently fails to line up with the physical organization of data, and thus, make no sense. As the size of allocation units grow, the disparity between these artificial base-10 quantities and the real quantities will grow ever larger just as the disparity between the stated hard drive sizes and their base-2 size grows large now. It doesn't make sense to continue to perpetuate these silly base-10 units. They are inherently imprecise because they are not a unit into which storage can actually be divided.
Using base-10 prefixes for storage is like choosing the base unit of mass to be 98% of the mass of a proton. Only an idiot would something like that. So why, then, do we continue to try to force the inherently imprecise use of base-10 quantities in storage? :-)
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
It should read: Hard disk manufacturing company marketing departments define one megabyte of hard drive space as 1,000,000 bytes: 10^6 bytes. Fucking reality calculates one megabyte as 2^20 bytes, or 1,048,576 bytes.
Actually, megabyte has always meant 10^6 bytes. The IEC have defined new prefixes for binary, e.g. Mebibyte for 2^20.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
AC> Pilots are just nuts, with their knots and feet.
While the use of feet might be dubious, there's a good rationale for using knots. One minute of latitude is one nautical mile long. This makes it very easy to do quick measurements on a chart while in-flight - since however you have a chart folded, you'll be able to see a longitude line (which has latitude tick marks as it goes up the page).
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows