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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.
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.
500GB of data loss?!? I CRIED for a half hour over a filled 160GB drive after it got killed by an electrical storm. Even though it wasn't technically covered under warranty, the fine folks at best buy still took it back after I said a defective flux capacitor on the drive started it on fire.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
In my experience, when S.M.A.R.T. tells you a drive is dead or dying, its not kidding.
Some problems with RAID 1+0:
Not all hardware controllers will allow you to do a reconstruct to add more
space and extend the partitions later on RAID 10 or 1+0.
Recovering from a failed 1+0 is ok if it is a "simple" failure.
I have had better luck recovering RAID5's than 10's or 1+0's.
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
Yeah, I've got to agree with you. I think that is one of the worst advices I have read on slashdot... A hard disk died on me a month after the S.M.A.R.T. thing started to annoy... it was on a laptop. Fortunately, I bought a bigger driver and passed all the information before the defective drive went dead.
While I agree that the S.M.A.R.T. heuristics might be a bit sensitive but if you consider what is at stake (yeah... your valuable pr0n collection), then I guess its better safe than sorry.
And, comparing it to the ink cartdriges? I am sure *your life* (or work...) does not depend on printing or not that pr0n picture...
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
That's nonsense. It isn't even true in theory. (at some point the remaining charge is below the noise-floor) If it wasn't you could store an infinite amount of data on a drive by simply filling it once with dataset1, overwrite by dataset2, overwrite by dataset3 and so on. You claim dataset1 will always be recoverable, so in this method, you could recover each of the sets and have stored triple amounts of data on the drive. You claim *any* amount of overwriting will be insufficient, so I guess I can store 1000 datasets on the drive then. Cool. Hint: The real world doesn't work like that
/dev/hda | strings" will recover huge amounts of text from a hard-drive which has been erased in this manner.
Secondly, even if in theory you where rigth (which you aren't), in *practice* most data is not valuable enough that theres much real risk that anyone will recover it, even after something as simple as a one-time-all-nulls overwrite. (which is just about the suckiest overwrite you can do) Yes, in that case an expert lab *can* recover it, but odds are it won't happen.
In practice, if you do the standard wipe, which is usually some variant of all-nulls, all ones, 3 times random, there is -zip- chance that anyone will be able to get at the data that was once on the platter.
Now, what many (clueless people) do are "format" the drive or "delete" the files. These functions don't overwrite even once 99% of the platter, so files removed in this manner are certainly recoverable -- they're there in plaintext, just not referenced from the filesystem anymore. Something as simple as "cat
-
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)
-
A 480 Mbit/s USB2 link is 480 * 10^6 bit/s (power of 10)
-
A 500 GByte disk is 500 * 10^9 bytes (power of 10)
-
A 56 kbaud modem is 56 * 10^3 baud/s (power of 10)
-
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
You really, really need to buy a lottery ticket.
I hate printers.
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
space and extend the partitions later on RAID 10 or 1+0. Likewise, many hardware controllers won't let you extend a RAID-5 array, (unless they implement some dynamic stripe size hack, a la ZFS's RAID-Z). Recovering from a failed 1+0 is ok if it is a "simple" failure. Please explain what a !simple failure would be. Here, let me give you a 'simple' failure case where RAID-5 would be pretty difficult to recover from: a drive fails in your RAID-5 array, and you lose power or experience another hardware failure shortly afterwards, before you can replace the drive. Whoops, you just became another victim of the RAID-5 write-hole (see the section under RAID-5 performance).
OK, here's why we use RAID-10 at my installation: it provides great performance and can survive multiple drive failures without the overhead of something like RAID-6. RAID-10 also has no 'write-hole'. Don't just take my word for it, though, check out this article from Adaptec comparing the merits of all the basic RAID levels and their nested brethren.
I'm Trappped at Berkeley.
No. I don't think you are. Or you are, but for a different reason.
Even the NSA very very probably can not recover any useful information from a disk overwritten the way I wrote. They have lots of money and expertise, but the laws of physics apply to them too.
But they could get at the information on your computer by other means that you'd be unlikely to detect, if they really wanted to. For example, if the information is from the net and you don't encrypt everything, they could easily wiretap your broadband. Getting a hardware-keylogger into your keyboard would be possible too, aswell as dozens of other tricks.
I've always thought you have a slightly better chance of getting valid data off of a drive if you never actually power it down when it's failing. This is anecdotal from a power outage causing many old hard drives in a building to give up, with their computers normally having uptime measured in months or even years.
Of course, to recover data like this you would need another computer accessible via the network, rather than installing a replacement in the desktop itself. Read any possible data off it while you still can, without putting it through the stress of powerdown/powerup.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
I think you've missed the point - RAID 1+0 allows you to fail up to n drives (with 2 n needed to build the array).
Additionally, should a drive fail, rebuilding will only marginally affect your performance, degrading it by a fraction compared to a RAID 5/6 rebuild. (Only 1 drive is affected out of your stripe set, the rest perform at peak operational speed)
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
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.
Yesterday at a Best Buy in Ohio a guy and his wife were looking at 42" Sony LCDs. There was a 1080P for $1899 and a 1080i for $1599. Guy asked the sales associate what the difference was.
Sales associate, I shit you not, said "The "P" is actually a newer product. It is 7 minor revisions later. We still carry the "i" because it's still very popular. The same thing happens with our wireless equipment, too. the "N" version is out, but most users are still buying the "G" Version"
I approached the guy after the sales associate left and said "listen, that guy has no clue what he's talking about. I is interlaced, P is progressive. On an "i" it's drawing 540 lines every frame, on a "p" it's drawing all 1080. Go with the "P" if you can afford the difference. It's worth it"
I lost 3 drives out of 6 within a few hours of each other. Raid 1+0 saved my bacon. Zero down time. Got the email alert about the first drive, and scheduled a trip to the datacenter. Then I got the other two back to back a couple hours later. These were all 15K rpm SCSI drives which had survived a 2 week stress test burn-in, and had been in production for about a year, so it was totally unexpected. In another case, I lost 2 drives in a Raid 5 and had to resort to restoring the machine from backups - a day lost. Raid 6 performance is even worse than Raid 5, so I personally see no point - YMMV. Raid 5 and 6 rebuild time is also VERY slow compared to 1+0, taking 3 times longer in my testing.
Anyway, what's that old saying? Expect the unexpected? When you buy a pile of drives, you are likely to get the batch from the same manufacturing line, day, etc. This probably also increases the chances of simultaneous failures if there is a physical quality problem. If you have two fail, expect a third. I generally don't mix up batches because I want to know where all the drives from a particular batch are, but maybe I should.
Except they'd have more parts, more complexity, and the larger components would need to be made to even finer tolerences since they need to remain well aligned over a much larger area (and they'd need to be stronger if you wanted to keep the same sort of RPM). They'd be much more expensive, and you'd probably still have to drop the density per platter a lot to keep it within the realm of sanity, not least because of things like thermal expansion having a much larger effect.
File next to the disk with multiple drive head assemblies; possible, but just not worth it when you could just fit more, smaller, cheaper, independent disks in the same space.
What are people doing with drives to make them fail?
I've got the same question, as I've gone through a lot of hard drives over the years but only due to upgrading, not failure. The only exception was the IBM Deskstar GXP75 that had the whole click of death thing going on. I don't count that one since it was a known issue that resulted in a class action suit, which I didn't bother to take part in. The first one failed within a month, so I replaced it at the store, and the replacement failed after a day. Replaced again. The third one failed after a week but I was tired of going back to the store by then so tried an experiment - the click of death was kicking in somewhere near 500MB after the beginning of the drive so I repartitioned it to leave the first 500MB unpartitioned. My experience with the drive up to that point told me that wherever the click of death manifested, it would consistantly happen in whatever part of the drive it first happened at. That drive has been in constant use ever since then (it's been like 5 years or so by now hasn't it?) and still works great, since it never accesses the 'bad part' anymore.
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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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?"