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

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

[Anonymous Coward]

The definition of Tera of anything is 10^12 of that object.

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.

Re:RAID 6 Please

[Spazmania]

Depends on the raid card. I run about 80 servers with a mix of HP/Compaq SmartArray, Adaptec aacraid, LSI Megaraid and Linux MD raid systems.

The Adaptec and LSI Megaraid cards are truly heinous. Just last week I had a system that wouldn't boot because the megaraid card decided that the NVRAM and on-disk settings didn't match... Even though the "force boot" option was set. Force-boot is supposed to write the on-disk config to nvram on a mismatch. As often as not, a machine with a megaraid card crashes on a single-disk failure instead of continuing to operate minus one disk. It'll reboot fine but not before you lose the unwritten data and deal with filesystem corruption. And God help you if a second disk develops a bad spot... It won't do the best it can to rebuild; it'll simply flunk leaving the good portions of the data unrecoverable.

I'll match Linux MD against those cards for reliability purposes any day. I wish there was some hardware I could buy that enhanced it with a battery-backed cache and parity acceleration. Then I could throw away the megaraid and adaptec cards.

The SmartArray cards are actually very good. Expensive as hell, but good. Sadly the primary configuration utility is on a CD instead of in the bios and some goober at HP decided to rig the disc so it won't boot on any hardware that's not HP/Compaq. Fortunately you can boot Knoppix, copy the linux config utilities and configure it that way.