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An In-Depth Look At Seagate's 1.5TB Barracuda
theraindog writes "More than a year and a half after the first terabyte hard drives became widely available, Seagate has reached the next storage capacity milestone. With 1.5 terabytes, the latest Barracuda 7200.11 serves up 50% more capacity than its peers, and at a surprisingly affordable $0.12 per gigabyte. But Seagate's decision to drop new platters into an old Barracuda shell may not have been a wise one. The Tech Report's in-depth review of the world's first 1.5TB hard drive shows that while the latest 'cuda is screaming fast in synthetic throughput drag races, poor real world write speeds ultimately tarnish its appeal."
I've always had good luck with these drives. It's the only brand I'll buy and recommend to another person. The fact they will warranty their drives for 5 years where most others will only do 1 - 3 years says something about them. If they're betting their drives will last 5 years, who am i to argue?
A whopping 2.4 MB/s (+ overhead, as you say)?
You realize that most modern drives are able to handle 60 MB/s with ease, even the low end ones, right?
You don't need 6 hard drives RAIDed to *watch* video...
I have a few of these drives... they are very fast for sequential read (>120MB/s sustained)
However, if write-cache is enabled (default) Linux will freeze intermittently reporting a SATA timeout executing a cache-flush command.
Tested with the 2.6.24 and 2.6.26 kernels. Other people have reported the same problem with the 2.6.27 kernel.
Tested with multiple drives and multiple SATA controllers (different chipsets). No SMART errors logged.
Thread on the Seagate support forum: http://forums.seagate.com/stx/board/message?board.id=ata_drives&thread.id=2390
The workaround is to disable write-cache on the drive.
Come on, any SATA drive can play an HD movie, even a BluRay rip comes out at what 45Mbit/s max, that's a punny 4.5MB/s, something IDE drives could do almost two decades ago.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I wonder why nobody is making 5.25" hard drives anymore... With current technology they could have at least 10TB capacity...
Two words:
Angular Momentum
At the outside of the disk there would be an incredible amount of stress on the rotating media.
The head seek times would go up as well....
Though, while 7200+ RPM would certainly be out, and likely 5400 RPM as well (remember the old drives ran <= 3600RPM, I would consider a 4200 RPM 10 TB drive for near-line storage...
even 5.25/FH that would be a decent volumetric density (equivelent to 5x 3.5" drives).
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
It's definitely your processor. 2Ghz C2D is absolute minimum for playing 1080p, even more for high bitrate media. Try using XBMC for playback, it's very efficient and may help you until you can afford to purchase another computer.
If your server has 128GB of ram then a 256GB swap file is 'normal'.
Only if you're pedantically following advice from 10 years ago. Swap "must be" 2x RAM was a suggestion at one time, but hardly required, and perhaps not even universally agreed upon best practice.
Advice: on VPS providers