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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.
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
Where nobody R's the TFA but instead spends their time making fun of the summary.
GiBs and MiBs are silly anyway. I happen to prefer Microsoft's usage in this case.
Regardless of whether the original article had it wrong, someone at Slashdot should've read the posted summary text and noticed the error. You shouldn't be a "News for Nerds" editor and not immediately notice that the sentence makes absolutely no sense as written.
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.
Now when will the first 1TB drive come out with a name I can trust? (Seriously, how they never retired the DeskStar name is beyond me.)
If you don't know what I mean...
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
There's one big difference though:
When you bought your 10 MB drive, you were going to store your operating system and word processor documents on it, with a few games.
When you bought your 100 MB drive, you stored the same, plus a few MP3s.
When you bought your 1 GB drive, you stored a large part of your music collection on it.
When you bought your 100 GB drive, you stored your entire music collection on it, as well as a few TV show seasons and several movies.
When you bought your 10 TB drive, you stored... more movies...
You see? We've been increasing the capacity of what we can store, so we went from regular files, to MP3s, to whole movies, to whole TV seasons... but from there? What takes more space than a season of a TV show? What is the next magnitude of data file size? What will you store on your 10 TB drive that will take up all the space?
Good luck playing back some MP3s on your 33Mhz 386 that came with that 100MB hard drive, heheh. Maybe replace those MP3s with MODs?
You'd have to be insane to have only a single partition on a 1 EB drive...
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
well hey, they decided to do that in electronics with direction of current.
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
High quality 1080p video. Animated textures for video games. A massive sample database for a voice synthesizer.
I'm not actually sure what you would do with a 10,000 TB hard disk - but 10 TB is well within the "use it up with some video" range.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
:) My point was why change what works? It seems that megabytes were used to mean 2^20 years before SI was ratified. I doubt cent is short for centidollar, although cent and centi are obviously related in that they both derive from Latin for hundred. I'm sure I'll eventually come around to these heinous sounding "mebi" and "gibi" prefixes, but I'm not going without a fight. And neither, apparently, are the vast majority of the population.
And I've yet not heard anyone except annoying geeks use the *bi prefixes.
Since when do two raided 500G drives count as "one 1TB drive". Since NEVER, is when. (Yes, that's what in those external 1TB that's been available before this one)
DeskStar = DeathStar ...yup, I've had more DeathStars fail than any other drive except for Connor and big old Maxtors
I'll wait for Seagates, thank you.
Most of the stuff on
It's common practise to use the highest number when representing something in an ad. Like for instance Cirrus aircraft advertise their aircraft's speed in MPH, when pilots actually use knots. This is because you get a number on the ad that's 15% bigger. And I bet Cirrus advertise the speed of their planes in Europe in km/h because this yields an even bigger number.
Personally, I wish we'd just get on with it and switch to base 16. It would be so much more convenient, and I'd be back in my early 20s again!
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Firstly, the 'mega' prefix (for example) was defined to mean 10^6
Well, it was defined as such only in the context of SI physical units, which do not include bytes.
Although people have much later tried to define it with respect to bytes as well, there are a large number of people (including myself) who regard this as unwanted interference with something that has worked very well for the majority of the lifetime of the computing field. It has increased confusion, not reduced it, because prior to this mebi-rubbish, usage was unequivocally determined by context.
What would Lemmy do?
For example, a 1MiB memory-module can be completely adressed by exactly by precisely 20 adress-lines, for which any combination represents a valid address.
But the "MiB" was only invented in 1998 (and became well-known significantly later than that), so how are you supposed to specify the capacity of the memory-modules you sell in a consumer-friendly way ?
Are you going to claim computer X comes with 1048576 bytes of storage ? That numbers seems very arbitrary for a non-tech person. It gets worse if your computer has 16Mib --- it's easy for consumers to compare "16" to "8" and conclude that the former is double, it's significantly less inituitive to deal with 8388608 versus 16777216 bytes. And you'd get lots of silly questions.
So, in short, we needed a name for 2**10, 2**20 and so on and had none, so somebody went with "KB" and "MB" etc, probably because they where "close" to correct.
I dunno, perhaps it'd have been better if they'd been sold as 16*2^20 modules. The problem is, offcourse, that people are unable to deal with scientific notation, many would think that 64*2^20 is more than 1*2^30 or atleast have serious problems comparing them.
Today, offcourse, the MiB exists and there's basically no excuse for not using it.