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Terabyte Hard Drive Put To the Test
EconolineCrush writes "As a technical milestone, Hitachi's Deskstar 7K1000 hard drive is undeniably impressive. The drive is the first to pack a trillion bytes into a standard 3.5" form factor, and while some may argue the merits of tebi versus tera, that's still an astounding accomplishment. Hitachi also outfitted the drive with 32MB of cache—double what you get with standard desktop drives—making this latest Deskstar a leader in both cache size and total capacity. That looks like a great formula for success on paper, but how does it pan out in the real world? The Tech Report has tested the 7K1000's performance, noise levels, and power consumption against 18 other drives to find out, with surprising results."
Now, my porn collection, THAT is what would put this drive to the test.
ge ge ge kanashhk shhk shhk fzzke kek shhk shhk
I love the sound of head crashes in the morning. Smells like... a coffee break.
I'm not losing my 1.5TB of porn to a single Hitachi Deathstar.
I feel bad enough when one of my 500GB drives goes tits up, I would hate to loose that much data on one drive.
But on the other hand, a full-tower case loaded with those in a raid5 is enough to make me drool.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
best hardware ad ever http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xPvD0Z9kz8 Get perpendicular!
FTFA: "Gigabyte drives were only "missing" 24 bytes, and that was easy to swallow."
i think they meant 24 megabytes, which is easy to scoff at now, but wasn't when the first gigabyte drives dropped.
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun the frumious Bandersnatch.
There have already been several drive models using this technology. Seagate's 7200.10 line comes to mind. Toshiba released one in 2005, for that matter. And Fujitsu's got some, too.
I like the tech report's personality better, but not really surprising results, IMHO. Old news from May:
a ge=0%2C7
http://www.storagereview.com/HDS721010KLA330.sr?p
Cliff's Notes:
Although the drive has higher areal density and a larger cache, it still performs worse than WD's latest 750GB Caviar SE16, which sells at a $0.10/GB discount to the Hitachi 7K1000.
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
This marketing BS always pisses me off. For years and years and years we've used 1024 in the computer world, since it's a power of 2, and computers deal with powers of 2. A 931GB drive is NOT a 1TB drive. And we don't need new stupid labels like tebi, we just need storage manufacturers to stop being retards.
Since when do we use base 1024 for counting anything but RAM? Network cards, harddisk capacity, etc. seems to me is ordinary prefixes a thousand at a time. Why the author has to go into an elaborate explanation on how you were ripped off seems pretty silly to me.
Maybe because a few OSes decide to measure overall filesystem capacity that way, but that doesn't make it right. It really only makes sense to measure files that way when you are dealing with memory mapped files, something users are almost never aware of. So why expose those nitty gritty details to the user? Throwback to an era of systems that had drive letters I suppose.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Drive caches were 2MB for so frickin' long, I have to wonder whether the upgrades we are seeing now are actually being forced by memory manufacturers phasing out uselessly small RAM chip sizes.
Come on! Just tell us what the results were directly, don't make us have to break Slashdot law and RTFA!
Conclusion in the article: Too expensive.
Make that RAID-6. With consumer grade drives I would not want to see a second drive die during a RAID-5 rebuild.
For example a 3ware 9650SE-8LPML can be had for as little $520.
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" - Carl Sagan
Is there any point to these "huge" caches? My Linux system uses a few hundred MB's as disk cache so I don't really expext another few MB's on the disk to make any noticable difference (and, if I recall it correctly, when disks with 8 MB caches were new they did not really gave any performance advantage compared to models with only 2 MB of cache).
Real life is overrated.
But they'd have still been way off.
For a decimal megabyte versus a binary one, there's 48 1/2 KB difference.
For a gigabyte, there's about 70 megabytes difference.
The only case where you'd only lose 24 bytes would be if you had a kilobyte drive.
F_T
The problem is this will be full in 24h with a 100Mbps connection anyways, or ~6 hours if you live in sweden.
Yes, but does it Destroy Planets ?
Stuff like that gets on my nerves to no end. So pointless.
I'm not that convinced by the testing methods here. The boot and load times page shows 20 seconds difference between the slowest and fastest drives which they barely comment on, and yet the drive with the slowest boot time is among the quickest when loading Far Cry and Doom 3? Something is not right there.
And if they're really timing level loads with a stopwatch, why on earth are they quoting 2 decimal places (and besides, the variability in reaction time is accounting for most of the supposed differences in any case). Half of their tests don't appear to tell anybody anything significant, and the most worthwhile page in there is the conclusion. Pretty graphics though.
Nothing new, then. At this point 1 TB may sound like "that much data", but then so did a 40 MB drive waaay back. Heck, at one point 1.4 MB meant a hard drive the size of a large washing machine. Nowadays that's called a floppy and already outdated.
What I'm getting at is that it's sorta like "Moore's law" for hard drives. (And occasionally Murphy's law too;) What's "whoa, I'd hate to lose that much data" at one point, is just adequate in a couple of years, and not even enough for your system files and/or swap file in 20 years.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Linux kernel is full of this marketing BS.
Look, I hate marketing dishonesty as much as the next guy, but borrowing the SI prefixes honestly does nothing but add confusion. Hard drives are easy, because one can safely assume that the marketing 'tards went with whatever number was bigger. But what about my phone's data plan? Aside from the whole kB vs kb thing, how do I know which definition of "kilo" my provider has gone with? Do they consider themselves with the "computer industry" or with the rest of the world? And (this is the best question), will the not-very-well-paid support grunt even know the difference?
Would you like it if you agreed to sell a dozen POS systems to a bakery, only to be told after the contract, "Sorry sir. This is the baking industry. You agreed to give us thirteen systems." Or if you got a $30 bill from your ISP with the explanation, "This is the computer industry. Though our adverts say this plan is $30 a month, that's hex. In base-ten dollars, you owe us $48."
You hate marketing people skewing reality. Good. It is only through fighting ambiguity that they can be stopped from getting away with this.
Do you know the difference between a pipe and a tube? If you get into any business involving either, I hope you don't repurpose the words everyone else has settled upon.
It's that extra bit of humility that really makes your post shine."Live as if you'll die tomorrow." Ridiculous. You could die later today.
http://stason.org/TULARC/pc/hard-drives-hdd/ibm/WD A-L42S-40MB-3-5-HH-IDE-AT.html
Hard Drive: IBM: WDA-L42S 40MB 3.5"/HH IDE / AT
Cylinders: 1067
Heads: 2
Sectors per track: 39
Bytes per sector: 512
1067 * 2 * 39 * 512 = 42,611,712 bytes
42,611,712 / 1024 = 41613 kilobytes
41613 kilobytes = just over 40.6 megabytes
This was sold as a 40MB drive. Not a 41MB, 42MB, or 43MB drive. A 40MB drive. And that's just what it was, a 40MB drive. So, I'm sorry to tell you, but lying about the drive's size was *NOT* always the way it was. This is just one example. And, no, I don't care for finding out exactly when manufacturers started lying about capacity. They did, and that's enough for me.
From the article:
"File copying is tested twice: once with the source and target on the same partition, and once with the target on a separate partition."
I really don't see how that's going to make any difference, unless by "separate partition" they really mean "separate drive".
Incorrect. The difference is 70 megabytes, 333 kilobytes, and 512 byes. Not 73 megabytes.
As an end-user who does not pirate stuff and does not download any music ( i mean come on, after Pink Floyd "Meddle", nothing good happened in the music business) because i have all the records (ten years after, pink floyd, deep purple - real music-) and no movies (my GF is a director so she takes care of that), what am i supposed to do with a terabyte ? To store raw HD movies cant HDDVDs do that ? Even for a server backup i would not use it. Once the drive goes wild, you can say good bye to your business, because that's a lot of your client's data you loose there.
The "clever" marketing company was Atari with the 520ST - they wanted to make it sound better than the Amiga with 520K of memory (it had 512K like anything else, but it was 520 in marketing terms). The same reason they has the 1040ST.
Note that it was sometime after that point in time (don't have the exact year) that some hard drive manufacturers started to play the same games. (Only with megabytes). Back then it was common to look at a 30meg vs 32meg drive and pick the 32meg drive. So when a marketing person figured out that a "real" 40meg drive could be called 42meg "unformatted" and get away with it, well, they did. And the other manufacturers followed and, well, everything was different by the time 1990 happened... (or so, maybe 1991 for the last holdout)
It really does not matter much now - but when different manufacturers followed different rules, it was a real problem.
(ps - Jack was always pushing the marketing envelope - albeit I can not claim to know if he did come up with the 520-vs-512 idea himself, he did push it rather hard)
Why use a new prefix when the suffix provides all the information you need. If we're talking bits and bytes, then we use the base 2 values. Simple.
-
A 128 kbit/s audio stream is 128 * 10^3 bit/s (power of 10)
-
A 100 Mbit/s ethernet card is 100 * 10^6 bit/s (power of 10)
-
A 480 Mbit/s USB2 link is 480 * 10^6 bit/s (power of 10)
-
A 500 GByte disk is 500 * 10^9 bytes (power of 10)
-
A 56 kbaud modem is 56 * 10^3 baud/s (power of 10)
-
A 1.5 GHz processor is 1.5 * 10^9 Hz (power of 10)
-
A 6 Mbit/s DSL line is 6 * 10^6 bit/s (power of 10)
-
A 650 MByte CD is 650 * 10^6 bytes (power of 10)
It is a total mystery to me why people think that power-of-2 prefixes should be the norm, when the only few places where they are used are to refer to the size of files and RAM sticks.Spread the truth. Mod me informative
"Kerbside shopping" expeditions and dumpster dives will be great just a few short years from now :-)
I've had two hard drives make horrible nasty clicking sounds and become unreadable by the PC. One was actually a friend's computer, and he made several attempts to use the computer (ie possibly causing more damage). In both cases I was able to recover all the important data by sticking the drive in an external USB enclosure, then sticking that in the freezer for 30 minutes. Take it out, plug it into a working computer, and get copying. You could probably even use dd if on a Linux system for an exact copy of the drive.
I don't really know the physics behind it, and there's no guarantee it will work for every hard drive problem, but I've heard lots of stories of people using this method successfully. Besides, what do you have to lose if your drive is already unreadable?
Losing a terabyte of data in one shot would be extremely painful for whoever it happened to...
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
we called those "deathstars"... I would hate to lose a trillion bytes.
Been using this drive as my primary music streaming audio drive while on the road, with rugged real-world everyday mission-critical use
in front of thousands of people, where one mis-hap is already too much.
So far things have been flawless, and it has made a huge difference for me due to portability compared to anything else of the same capacity.
as previously this meant a two-drive combo with heftier power supply.
The weight and size make it easier to have it as a carry-on item, rather than in my checked luggage!
As far as performance, it has been able to handle 4 simultaneous 24-bit / 96 kHz audio tracks playing back with no hiccups whatsoever.
The drive-to-drive copying in Firewire 800 or SATA has been quite speedy and error-proof.... (copying 900 gig at a time is always a good test)
Dream come true if you ask me.... I still carry a backup anyway, LOL!
(ymmv(TM), batteries not included, kids don't try this at home, etc....)
Z.
But instead of going with whatever number that fits their specific field, they all went with 1000. Really, that IT people refuse to do the same makes us look utterly retarded.
Not that it matters anyway. With 8 bits on the byte, we're doomed before we even start. There is no hope in sight until we just ditch this shit, get a clue from the network people, and start counting bits in multiples of 1000.
I lost my sig.
So this baby has 200gb platters, it sounds all impressive and all, except we've had 188gb platters for ages now.
:/
Seagate has announced (and released, I think?) their 1TB HDD with only 4 platters (cooler, quieter, less power, less weight, less cost to manufacture) that's 250gb a platter
Samsung have announced the F1 using 333GB per platter! 1.6TB if they copy Hitachi and slap 5 of them in a 3.5" unit - or rather 333gb single platter, light, cheap drives, be damned if anyone can find the F1 yet though
Mass storage volumes within the 3851 Mass Storage Facility have the following characteristics:
404 cylinders
19 tracks per cylinder
13,030 bytes per track maximum
100 megabytes
404 cylinders * 19 tracks per cylinder * 13030 bytes = 100018280 bytes
100018280 bytes
http://www.bighole.nl/pub/mirror/www.bitsavers.or
From the same document:
KB = thousands of bytes
Interestingly, this form factor would neatly fit some 512 MicroSD cards leaving enough room for mechanics (slots, frame) and electronics. Take 512 2GB cards, you get 1 terabyte of solid state memory. Each of the cards can work independently from the others = easy RAID of 512 disks = quite insane speeds possible, and cheap replacement of failing parts (you replace a single failing card, not the whole device). Of course the price would be higher, but still the 1TB drive isn't cheap for sure, and without RAID.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
You are right. I should have said 56 kbps. V.92 modems run at 8000 baud.
I'm not sure how it's supposed to get 10x the storage simply by mounting a drive sideways instead of flat, but I believe anything marketing tells me...
Pssss... megabytes, mebibytes, kilobytes, kibibytes... My Windows can calculate in kelvinbytes. Now beat this!
"It would be wrong to refuse to face the fact that everything is fundamentally sick and sad."
Hard drives used to be physically much bigger, when the interface tech was "MFM: 5.25" diameter, and "Full Height" was about 3.5".
Physically smaller discs have faster access times and lower power consumption. But why not use larger discs for their higher data capacity, without wrapping each smaller chunk in the same electronics overhead for rotation and data transfer? And get the faster data transfer at the outer cylinders from their faster angular velocity?
At a guess, I'd say that a 5.25" full height HD could have 2.5x the 3.5" capacity per platter, and probably at least 5x the platters, for about 12x the capacity. The access times across the large areas would be larger, but for large files that wouldn't matter as much (as long as they're kept defragmented).
These truly "large" drives could be the best for archiving, thrown back in place after an emergency and gradually replaced with 3.5" disks (if necessary) as they continue to run.
We could have 12TB drives with the same encoding tech as these Hitachis. And they'd cost less per TB than the 3.5" ones, because they'd have more storage per overhead hardware. Where can I get one?
--
make install -not war
It died a horrible death only three years later, just outside of warranty. Despite a class action lawsuit against IBM (in the US, not Canada) I couldn't get it replaced. There was apparently a fix for it, simply by downloading a program, but really, who looks for updates to their hard drives?
IBM further went into my bad books, after it simply sold off the business to Hitachi instead of fixing their mess. It really left a sour taste in my mouth for IBM ...
While Hitachi uses 5 platters for 1TB, Spinpoint F1 manages to pack that space on only 3 platters, so it should be faster, more quiet and lower power than Hitachi. Not to mention good deal cheaper.
I've seen lots of hard drive failures, and only once has SMART ever given me any indication of a problem. I consider it pretty much pointless now.
It must have been mid-90s. I don't know the price at release, but I remember buying one at about $500 from Insight in computer shopper.
Cool... now if I only had the money to buy this harddrive I would be set.
http://www.peeniewallie.com/2007/07/drobo.html
This new storage device is unimaginably cool. I watched the Drobo video today and this thing is so slick I thought it might be a hoax. But, it's a real product. It figures. I got my Buffalo Terastation in October, and this little jewel comes out six months later. Doh!
If you're looking for a storage solution for a lot of data, this Drobo looks like the way to go.
"... and that is why you should measure your lumber in units of 10."
"But 10 is such an awful number to do carpentry with. What if I need to cut a timber into three equal lengths?"
"Then just set your standard measure so a typical timber is 30 units long instead of 10 units long."
"But what if I want to take a 1/3rd cut and also cut that into thirds?"
"Oh I give up. Making nomenclature consistent across industries is so damned inconvenient! Why bother? Just stick with your yards, feet, and inches. See if I care."
Consistency and convenience often end up on opposite sides of the table.
Not quite. They're still labeled in bytes, not bits. Though I suppose we shouldn't be giving the marketroids any more stupid ideas...I think I see a flaw in the benchmarks. They're using Windows to benchmark the different drives. This is not a dig at Windows, but specifically, the problem is that by default, Windows allocates a percentage of hard drive space to be used as swap space. On the boot times listed, the 1TB drive has the slowest boot time. Could that be because the pagefile on the 1TB drive is by default larger than the pagefile on the smaller drives? Is this particular benchmark skewed? Would the results be different if the testers set a static pagefile size of, say, 1.5GB on all the drives tested, then used SysInternals PageDefrag to make it contiguous?
<:
TOO states " As the first hard drive to reach the terabyte mark, Hitachi's Deskstar 7K1000 will be remembered, too. Squeezing a trillion bytes into a 3.5" hard drive form factor is a monumental engineering achievement"
I doubt that anyone will remember this in a year. Quick; what was the model and manufacturer of the first drive to pass 500GB, or 1GB. Both were monumental engineering achievements in their time. These milestones will not be remembered because they are all evolutionary; a 10-30% jump in capacity. When we see 10x capacity increases in one generation, THAT name might be remembered.
That said.. good job Hitachi, but we all know that WD and Seagate will be out with their versions in a month or so.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
http://www.stlyrics.com/lyrics/avenueq/theinternet isforporn.htm ...
TREKKIE AND GUYS
Porn, porn, porn, porn
porn, porn, porn, porn
KATE
I hate the internet!
TREKKIE AND GUYS
Porn, porn, porn, porn
TREKKIE
The internet is for
TREKKIE AND SOME
The internet is for
TREKKIE AND ALL
The internet is for PORN!
TREKKIE
YEAH!
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Personally, it would be *much* better if we all adopted base 16 and switched SI over to that also.
Then, the merchant class would have a system easily measured by hand. Doubling 4 times to reach the next place or halving four times to reach the previous. Much easier than trying to divide something physical into tenths by hand.
Also, one place in base 16 corresponds to exactly 4 in binary. Thus, unifying the merchants with the techies.
Finally, it is easy to count to 16 using only one hand (by placing the end of your thumb on the palm side of the 12 remaining knuckles and 4 remaining fingertips (12 + 4 = 16). Using both hands we could count to the equivalent of base 10's 256. This unifies mathematicians with the merchants and the techies.
This would bring peace and harmony to the world of numbers...
One last thing: Sometimes I wonder; "Is that someone's signature? Or do they type that at the end of each post?"
Armchair psychology here, but a lifetime of giving the government a several-percentage-point commission on everything you buy will certainly make a similar loss on advertised hard drive space "easy to swallow".
We've become used to the idea that advertised prices are slightly better than what we'll really be paying (sales tax), and that gross incomes are slightly more than what we'll actually be taking home (income tax), and that the price of some product might cost a few percent more next year (inflation).
Many states and countries have consumption taxes right in line with the "easy to swallow" 7.3% gap that fails to "ruffle" this author's feathers. Can you really blame hardware manufacturers for trying to get away with the same figure-fudging? Perhaps when we get to the double-digit gaps of petabytes and higher, people will start noticing. Then again, a 12.6% sales tax is downright cheap in the EU!
because nobody can buy a 1TB samsung?
So, uh, what non-Hz/telecom or non-marketing based ones again?
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Remember the uberlarge "32-megabit" SNES cartridges? 32 Mb = 4MB. A couple of floppies, which doesn't seem so impressive...
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Filesystems still allocate files with blocks that are multiples of 1k (1024). Binary numbers of blocks comprise larger allocation and accounting units and limits and such and so those binary representations are useful to system administrators who need to where those cylinder group boundaries are going to be... blah blah blah. Or what size blocks to use and how many when doing binary copies for restoring your data and such.
OTH you should be able to choose the representation. SI accounting for files > 1000000 bytes, and an integral number of 'blocks' for small files, whatever that smallest allocation unit is.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I laughed when, once again, the most important number in the specs was ignored in this article: the disk-to-buffer tranfer rate. The interface bandwidth, upon which the article wasted the second column of that first table, is immaterial because it's the SAME for all drives of the same class; in fact, there's really been no real-world benefit from SATA II *yet*, because no drive has been able to fully utilize even SATA I (has any?). It's the actual rate that the drive can yank data off the drive - the disk-to-buffer transfer rate - that really counts. This drive seems to do better than my aging 250GB Hitatchi SATA II drives, which have a DTB rate of about 72MB/s. According to the article, it might not be able to keep up with the 750GB WD SE16 I just bought (and for only $194.99 total, BTW). I always discount the value of the cache, because it's just never big enough to really matter... they'd have to be orders of magnitude larger to have a pronounced effect (a true "hybrid" drive, not like Acomdata's so-named toy).
However, the real value of this drive isn't speed; Hitachi has merely used PR to make its speed competitive. The real value of this drive is as an upgrade for low-end RAID arrays built on single HBAs with a fixed number of ports: this drive means such arrays can be upgraded without having to buy another HBA with more ports, etc. Even if such an array of, say, four drives in RAID 5 used 750MB drives now, replacing those drives with these terabyte drives would be a significant increase in array capacity.
It seemed pretty clear to me that the purpose of these drives was just such scenarios, not to be entered into hard disk drag races. Hitachi managed to keep the DTR on par with the Joneses while offering a 33% boost in single-egg capacity... and it's a useful mass-market demonstration of perpendicular recording, too.
Quite a few stores have them.
I have ordered a few and am waiting for a delivery- should be here in a few days...
...across the room? There has to be a good story behind this.
After 15 pages (with no notable "print version" option) and enough meaningless graphs, charts, and whoozits to get you a bandwidth warning from your ISP...
It's really big. But it's not really fast. But you're gonna buy it anyways. Cuz it's a fricken TERABYTE!!! Or is that TibiByte? TribbleByte? I'm not sure, I'll have to go read the first few pages again...
Seriously, why the hell do they pain us with all these charts? When was the last time you went to buy a HD and went "Oh, no, not that one, it scored low on the MP3/ISO transfer test, even though it did really good on the Photoshop render thingy and the Doom3 loadscreen".
Sheesh.
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
At my company, we have taken to using our own expression(s) to avoid the confusion. Since we are in the computer industry we tend to deal with 1,024 far more than 1,000. So when the trillion vs. 2^40 byte issue first surfaced, for some reason we started calling 10^12 bytes a "trillobyte" (trillion bytes) vs. 2^40 bytes which is a "terabyte". I think it's because we liked the role "trilobytes" played in evolution. Then it spread - so we use millobyte for 10^6 and billobyte for 10^9. And I suppose we'll call 10^15 bytes a "quadrillobyte" not a "petabyte" when those numbers come into regular use in, say, 8 years or so.
.008 bits :P
BTW, I know that "millobyte" is too close to "millibyte", but we figure there can't be any confusion unles and until there is some use for 10^-3 bytes =
"Nobody gives a rat's ass about 'the SI unit.' These are computers." you say?
Facts are stubborn things. SI units predate computers, and the linguistic corruption (ab)used by computer jargon would be fine if they didn't cause confusion when talking to other people who expect to hear people talking about a certain prefix to be talking about it, and not something else they've decided to call by the same name.
"And we've always used kilobyte/megabyte/etc as they applied to computers."
Your appeal to tradition opposes clear, unambiguous communication, and is thus illogical. I don't think this type of appeal is inherently bad, but here it inhibits a tangible win, so it's out.
"You think you're right, but you're not."
No, YOU think you're right, but you're not. Your argument is an emotional one. You try to pound the point home by repeating your point: "a {whatever}byte will always be 1024 {whatever-1}byte" over and over again.
Your petty, grumpy position stands to save you a little adolescent embarrassment in exchange for remaking the world in your vision, forcing it to cater to your capricious whim, and cause ambiguity or long-windedness in communication just to get precise ideas across. FWIW, I think all these Mebi- and such sound stupid too, as I've always called them by their "traditional" names. I still do, but only to people who know the difference; and I always write MiB even when if I say "megabyte".
5, Insightful? I expect more thoughtful, less emotional reaction from Slashdot moderators.
Captcha: repress
...you're fucked. You might have 2+ extra drives, but you'll wait a week for the replacement raid card. With MD, you throw the disks in another box and you're back in business.
It all depends on your application, but if I lose a few seconds of transactions, it is no big deal to me.
If you have the cash to throw at Oracle, then you have the cash to throw at hardware scsi raid or a NAS.
The rest of us will get by quickly and cheaply with software sata raid.
But that's not true. It's common when measuring RAM and ROM sizes, and sometimes when reporting file sizes (by no means all systems though). But many uses in computers use SI base 10 notation, or even weird mixtures. This is not new; it goes back to the early days in computing.:
When a downloading program reports it's getting "1MB/s", it is rather ambiguous: is that a binary k because you're storing 1MB (MiB) every second, or is it decimal k for consistency with communications usage, showing off your 8Mbit/s (decimal) cable modem at peak performance? Likely it will depend on the background of the person who wrote the program, or the context in which it's being used. Sure, you might think it should always use the binary notation. A communications engineer would see it differently. A status display on your cable modem's web page would look weird showing it had negotiated an 8Mbit/s connection while telling you the theoretical maximum download rate is 953kB/s; it would need an explanation to avoid complaints.
Summary: the idea that binary notation is used in computers is historically true only for some kinds of measurement, and even then it's been a source of confusion.
What are people doing with drives to make them fail?
My girlfriend "tossed" my new macbook pro onto a carpeted floor in a fit of disgust over some relationship complaints getting back to her via another attractive woman who I vented to (note to all other inexperienced daters- don't ever do this).
The macbook pro made it (slightly bent but I was able to unbend it)... the laptop drive did not.
"But it was carpeted", she later said, after I blew up.
To her credit, she did charge the data recovery fee ($3,500 from DriveSavers) to her school, so I got back all my data. Ah, the ups and downs of dating a school administrator...
I would have dumped her right there, but she used to be a cheerleader, likes a lot of sex, likes to drink as much as I do, doesn't mind my music, and not only plays WoW with me, but has more toons. Also scuba dives with me. It's a tough call...
If you don't already know that the information is being stored in binary bytes, and need to change 'terabyte' to 'tebibyte' in order for you to realize and understand that, then you shouldn't be fooling around with hard drives in the first place.
Just how dumb is society going to get?!
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....