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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.
best hardware ad ever http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xPvD0Z9kz8 Get perpendicular!
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.
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.
No matter how big a hard drive gets it still only has two states: new and full.
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
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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
You really, really need to buy a lottery ticket.
I hate printers.
Because it isn't safer, at least not unless you have a battery-backed interface card *anyway*. And usually the only cards with battery-backing are... hardware raid cards. I have been known to use linux-md on an old hardware raid card, when the card had a very slow processor. But these days, raid cards have processors in the 300-600 MHz range, AND ASIC or FPGAs to do parity. They're more than adequate.
Also, linux-md doesn't guarantee ordering, which hardware-raid cards, as they're intended for use with oracle and friends, do.
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
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.
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"
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.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
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.