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."

Comments

tebi? shut up. 1 terabyte drive still NOT here

[_Shorty-dammit]

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.

Re:tebi? shut up. 1 terabyte drive still NOT here

[_Shorty-dammit]

Way to pay attention. Nobody gives a rat's ass about "the SI unit." These are computers. And we've always used kilobyte/megabyte/etc as they applied to computers. You think you're right, but you're not. A kilobyte will always be 1024 bytes. A megabyte will always be 1024 kilobytes. A gigabyte will always be 1024 megabytes. And a terabyte will always be 1024 gigabytes...

Re:tebi? shut up. 1 terabyte drive still NOT here

[Eivind]

It's worse than that actually, because as the sizes grow, the disparity grows too.

• When you say 1KB, the difference is 2.4% or 24 bytes.
• When you say 1MB, the difference is 4.8% or 48KB.
• When you say 1GB, the difference is 7.4% or 74MB.
• When you say 1TB, the difference is 10% or 100GB.

So, the higher the capacity, the more difference is there between binary and decimal units. 2.4% difference is significant enough, but it's not as bad as 10%. Lacking 100GB, or a full tenth of the capacity is however quite noticeable.

Re:Data loss

[jimicus]

RAID 1+0 is the way to go for redundancy. Unless you're unlucky enough to lose both drives in one of the pairs making up the array, you can survive more than one drive failing.

It's also the way to go for speed - your controller doesn't have to calculate the parity bits for every write operation (yes I know the parity sum is simple - that doesn't stop it from adding a bottleneck).

RAID5 is most useful where:

1. You desperately need the space.
AND
2. You can't afford the drives (or, for that matter, power/larger RAID controller) required to acheive the same space in RAID 1+0.

The value of consistent nomenclature

[Valacosa]

Nobody gives a rat's ass about "the SI unit." These are computers.

Yeah. Making nomenclature consistent across industries is damned inconvenient! Why bother?

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.

You think you're right, but you're not.

It's that extra bit of humility that really makes your post shine.