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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."
How important is throughput? I'd be interested in knowing what percentage of these drives are going in external enclosures. For the time being, 1.5tb is much larger than you'd need to be running any applications off of and I'd guess the majority of these drives are going to be storing movies, mp3s and photos, where the speed hardly matters at all.
Whale
So this thing will have a true terabyte of 1024+ Gigs?
When the first 1TB came out they were priced at around $400 if I remember right. This one is retailing for $200 or so. Thus its almost beating moore's law. Not that moore's law applied to hard-drives anyway.
Wow. My first hard drive was 20mb. I bought a keychain flash drive the other day with 16gb of storage. I can go on youtube and watch playthrough recordings of games that had me going ZOMGWTF!!! 15 years before that phrase was even coined. I remember being blown away by how incredibly awesome the newer Sierra adventure games were once they supported VGA graphics.
I remember how cool I thought it was when I could dub my dad's old sabbath records off onto a tape and bring my tunes with me on the go. It boggles the mind that I can fit dozens of albums on a single mp3 player. The Internet makes Asimov's concept of the Encyclopedia Galactica appear small and pathetic, we're seeing more and more scifi computer technology made real each and every day. Snow Crash, anyone? With how the economy's tanking, I expect burbclaves are just a few years off.
Makes me wonder what I'll be thinking given another ten years of progress, what will be boggling my mind then?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
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Eh, there are two main points which got conflated.
1) A drive this size will likely not be used for high-performance tasks. That is, it will probably be used for storage of music and movies rather than for applications and swap.
2) That enclosures will be slow.
Point 1 still hasn't been contested, and the first "troll" post didn't seem to care to discuss that--he just seemed to want to attack the idea that someone would only use a disk this size on a slow bus. The more I think about it, the more it sounds trollish--rather than attacking the thesis of the post, he nit-picked in order to argue.
Point 2--you're right. There are high-speed external enclosures, though in my experience, eSATA is fairly rare. I have a drive (used for backups) with both eSATA and USB, and I'd love to be able to use the eSATA, but so far, I have been unable to find an expansion card with suitable (if any) Linux support. Nonetheless, I'm not at all surprised that this was overlooked by the OP, but it's still irrelevant. If you don't need high write speeds, that should not deter you from buying this drive.