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:Oh, stop ye whining!

[mi]

The pound is a measurement of force.

No, the pound (lb) is mass. For force, you need pound-force (lbf)...

As far as engineers go, I'd rather they be thinking in (kilo)grams and Newtons, when they think of masses and forces (including weights) respectively...

kibibytes & mibimeters

[zippthorne]

Except only computer people use those units. SI prefixes are factors of 10^x where x is an integer (typically a multiple of 3)

This standard has been in place for far longer than the "binary" prefixes, yet computer people continue to assert their use. As convenient as powers-of-two are for operating systems, is it really convenient enough to muddy up perfectly good standard prefix definitions. Ironic that most of these people are metric supremacists when it comes to physical units...

So the question is, who is the scummiest, HDD manufacturers who use the overall more standard standard, which happens to over represent their capacity in a world where software distributors typically use a common-to-the-field standard which happens to under represent their requirements?