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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."
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)
best hardware ad ever http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xPvD0Z9kz8 Get perpendicular!
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.
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
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Let us take your absolutism to its logical conclusion.
Prima: I've got a huge car!
Secunda: Dude, I've got a huge cat!
* SUV-sized cat walks in.
Prima: Dude!
Secunda: (looking to camera) No, you see, "big" is an adjective, and must be read in the context of the noun it describes. A big cat is not the same size as a big car, or a big house, or a big boat. Prima: I see what you're saying. Similarly, a "kilo-gram" is prefixing the gram, a base-10 system, thus 10^3 grams; while a "kilo-byte", prefixing the byte, part of a base-2 system, refers to 2^10 bytes?
Secunda: Exactly! Humans, complex machines that they are, make use of context to bring out meaning.
Prima: But on Wikipedia it says this use is incorrect?
Secunda: Well, Wikipedia has the quality of a scientific journal... assuming submissions to scientific journals were all accepted for publication, and could be edited by anyone at any time.
Prima: So, the individual or group with the most amount of time ends up producing the predominant content?
Secunda: Exactly! The best way to confirm whether an article is likely to be useless is to read its talk page; in fact, you are more likely to learn from this page, as it illustrates the points of contention that one side or the other has tried to suppress.
Prima: So for the past two decades we have called 1024 bytes a "kilobyte", until one standards body associated with manufacturers of hard drives decided to redefine it...?
Secunda: Precisely. Worse, the previously unambiguous (outside of hard drive manufacturing) "kilobyte" is now defined as "1000 bytes". It'd be like renaming the mile to the "iMile", then stipulating that all future uses of "mile" should be based on the origin of the word - i.e. one thousand double paces.
Prima: But paces vary from person to person - it's like you're making an arbitrary change based in a tenuous argument that goes against the principle that language evolves other than by edict!
Secunda: Now you're getting the hang of it. Have you considered becoming a Wikipedia editor?
Tercera: Listen you two, either shut up or get a room.
Prima: Let's get some beer.
Secunda: Word.
* SUV-sized cat disappears in a puff of semantics, replaced with a slightly overweight puddytat.
The "mile" had been defined as 1000 double-paces since before the supposed birth of Christ. But then its meaning evolved in various contexts - the statute mile, the nautical mile, etc. Or, to use your language, "people ARBITRARILY redefined the mile". I hope that you maintain consistency with the original Roman definition when observing speed limits.
The "kilo", as you say, was defined according to the SI system in C18 to mean "1000 of". But then, as you barely well describe, its meaning evolved in a particular field. In fact, even better, it evolved within a specific context, so all its previous uses stand; and the redefintion was far from ARBITRARY, since powers of 2 make sense to use in binary, and powers of 10 usually don't.
Please try to get to grips with context in understanding language. It's a skill some engineers are very bad at; X in context A is not precisely X in context B. It never will be, because this sort of simplified reasoning abrogates the human brain's fantastic ability to recognise patterns without the need for identity.
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.
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
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
I think that the '40 megabyte' branding is just rounding to a multiple of ten... but anyway, the first commercial hard disk, the IBM 305, had a capacity of five megabytes - five million bytes, exactly - and was sold as such. Actually, it could have held more, but marketing thought that five megabytes was a nice round number. (Some of the space was taken for error correction, though.)
(The long series of calculations you have to go through in your post are the best argument for ditching the 1024*1024*1024 nonsense and just using thousands, millions and billions like the rest of the world.)
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
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
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.
Why fight the rest of the world over this? Now that we have binary prefixes, let's use them! This idea that metric prefixes are base 10 in networking and base 2 in storage is embarrassingly inconsistent. Let binary prefixes mean binary, and let metric prefixes mean base 10! Just because we did it one way in the past doesn't mean it is the best way to do it now! This is engineering, not religion.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Hitachi_Hard-Drive_Project_-_Noriko_Version.mp3
Written by James Postlethwaite, whose home page I can't find, and made entirely out of hard drive failure noises (Hitachi provide a nice set of wavs).