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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."
Well, when you can only slam 4kb of data into the drive bus at any one time, it doesn't require a whole lot of cache to keep up.
Formatting has nothing to do with it. Neither does swap space or file system overhead, or anything else like that. The "lost" space isn't lost to anything like that. The 1000 vs 1024 math is the only culprit. The fact that their drive has the capability to store 1 trillion bytes doesn't make it a 1 terabyte drive. When they release a drive that can store 1,099,511,627,776 bytes, *then* they have a terabyte drive. A trillion bytes is only 931.3GB, period.