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

[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?