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

'106' should be '10 to the sixth'

[Jimmy_B]

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'.

106 and 220 bytes

[Tofof]

Article summary should read 10^6 bytes, not 106, and similarly 2^20 not 220.

Re:Zonk

[Volante3192]

Well, that's just an exact quote from the original article. Should have put [sic] next to it at least...

WTF

[rjamestaylor]

Operating systems calculate one megabyte as 220 bytes, or 1,048,576 bytes.

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...

Re:WTF

[compro01]

it looks like the >sup tags got stripped or something. it's like that in TFA. presumablely they mean 2^20 bytes, which is correct.

Re:WTF

[JensenDied]

Considering that the information is already up top ill tag it on here since it was asked again.
When they said 1MB = 220 bytes, they meant 2^20 or 2²⁰ Bytes.
Bring on the -1 Redundant.

Re:eh?

[srmalloy]

It's whatever editing or posting software was used eating characters. Manufacturers report a megabyte as 10^6 bytes (1,000,000), while computers report a megabyte as 2^20 bytes (1,048,576).

Old News...

[vonsneerderhooten]

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.

Re:eh?

[Dogtanian]

Manufactures correctly report a megabyte as 10^6 bytes (1,000,000), while good quality computer software also reports a megabyte as 10^6 bytes, while reporting a mebibyte as 2^20 bytes That as may be true by today's "official" definitions. However, as I understand it, pretty much everyone had standardised around the base-2 definitions, and the only reason the current confusion exists is because some worthless prick in a marketing department somewhere saw a quick-and-easy way to make his employer's hard drives look bigger than they were.

Had this not happened, would the standards bodies have insisted upon strict adherence to the base-10 meanings in the face of the other meanings being universally accepted? Even if they had, they'd likely have been ignored... well, until the aforementioned sales-twat saw a way to flog more hard drives to the gullible. Tossers.