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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.
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.
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 ?
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.
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.
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)
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A 128 kbit/s audio stream is 128 * 10^3 bit/s (power of 10)
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A 100 Mbit/s ethernet card is 100 * 10^6 bit/s (power of 10)
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A 480 Mbit/s USB2 link is 480 * 10^6 bit/s (power of 10)
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A 500 GByte disk is 500 * 10^9 bytes (power of 10)
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A 56 kbaud modem is 56 * 10^3 baud/s (power of 10)
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A 1.5 GHz processor is 1.5 * 10^9 Hz (power of 10)
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A 6 Mbit/s DSL line is 6 * 10^6 bit/s (power of 10)
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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
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
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
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.
So, what, you'd rather have had zero indications of hard disk failure then only one?
I've had four drives fail on me before (all of them Maxtor), SMART predicted one of them a month in advance by which time I'd backed up the whole thing. Maybe it missed the other three but even if it only catches a few errors, that's still a hell of a lot better than none isn't it?
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
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
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TREKKIE AND GUYS
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The internet is for
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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?"