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.

Comments

Re:106 bytes and 220 bytes, ???

[Roger W Moore]

They mean that superscript tags don't work when submitting stories to slashdot. If should read 10^6 and 2^20.

Re:Zonk

[ReverendLoki]

I see where they screwed up.. in this sentence:

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.

"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.

Re:Zonk

[nine-times]

It was probably originally typed as:

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.

And then the tags got stripped somehow.

First review? ummm... Anandtech, March 19th....

[Fallen Kell]

Initial review March 19th:

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=29 49

Follow-up RAID performance April 19th:

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=29 49

Follow-up to the follow-up April 23rd:

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=29 74

Megabyte/Terabyte

[Bobb Sledd]

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?

Re:Megabyte/Terabyte

[init100]

Therefore, a "kilobyte" to them is 1,000 bytes (as opposed to 1,024 bytes in real life)

Actually, it is more like the "kilo = 1000" is the real life meaning, and the "kilo = 1024" is something dreamed up by some hacker in his own little world. I mean, one kilogram is 1000 grams, one kilohertz is 1000 hertz, one kilometer is 1000 meters, etc.

I have one - this is what ext3 defaults too.

[Anonymous Coward]

df .
Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb1            961432072    221096 912372976   1% /data

Re:why explain prefixes?

[SEMW]

For an example of the difference, people don't say that they have a megadollar or a gigaduck (not normal people) Maybe not, but they do say "centidollar" -- at least in its abbreviated form, "cent".

I'd like to see the pedantic community start discussing things in mebimeters and gibiwatts before they start trying to change the computer community's standard meanings. Huh? There would be no reason for people to use mebimeters and gibiWatts, because metres and Watts are Metric units and thus are base 10. It would not make sense to use base 2 prefixes (mebi, gibi) in a base 10 system. It does, on the other hand, make sense to use base 10 units in a base 10 system such as the metric system, and likewise base 2 units in a binary system.

Re:Why is this still a discussion?

[clem.dickey]

Ever try to design a processor that uses 1000 byte pages? Good freaking luck.

No, but these guys did.

Re:kibibytes & mibimeters

[Alioth]

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).