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3TB Hard Drives Square Off Against Everything Else
crookedvulture writes "Last week, Western Digital announced its intention to buy rival drive maker Hitachi. Interestingly, those are the only two companies with 3TB hard drives available for sale. The Tech Report takes a closer look at how the two models compare with each other and over 30 different hard drives and SSDs. The resulting data paints a detailed picture of the storage landscape and is worth skimming for anyone curious about how spindle speeds and flash memory impact performance, power consumption, and noise."
Seagate has had a 3TB drive on the market for -months.- They were the first on the scene, in fact. How'd you miss this? They have a 64MB cache, 7200rpm SATA II / USB 2.0 / 3.0 external drive, with the internal drive version of it with a new, custom firmware to allow for old BIOS installation hitting the shelves at the end of March. You can take it out of the enclosure and use it internally if you really want.
That's not "the only two." That just makes Seagate "the only ones that waited for extra dev time to make it widely compatible for non-techies."
There's a spot in User Info for World of Warcraft account names? Really?
*3TB internal
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3858/the-worlds-first-3tb-hdd-seagate-goflex-desk-3tb-review
lol.. someone tell the super-aspergers at wikipedia they dont need to delete knowledge anymore... we have 3TB harddrives now...
...I forget what is on it all the time. Sometimes I wander across some forgotten directory and it is like discovering a secret treasure trove, but usually it is junk. I'm not prepared to say "We'll never need more than 3TBs of hard drive space," but aside from cyber-hoarders, porn addicts, and legitimate business uses, the supply of hard disk space has clearly exceeded the demand.
From someone whose Hitachi backup drive just saved his bacon when his 4th WDC drive this year failed, I'd say this is bad news.
Maybe its time to buy a shedload of these 3Tb drives before WDC gets their hands on them and they become Deathstars again.
#include <sig.h>
Did they get the alignment between the old 512 byte and new 4096 byte sectors right for the Caviar Green? I know the performance is average, but mine doesn't suck as much as their benchmarks make out. The Caviar Green misreports its structure as 512 byte sectors, in an effort to be windows compatible. To get full performance out of it, you have to be careful to (possibly manually) align the file system so its 4096 byte clusters line up with the drive's 4096 byte sectors. If not, the Caviar green attempts to emulate 512 byte sectors, and has to do multiple accesses for each 4096 byte cluster read/written. On read, it needs to read the first half of the cluster, then the second half (throwing away portions of each sector). It gets worse on write, as the drive will read in a sector, write the part of the cluster that overlaps it, then write it back, then repeat the process for the second portion of the unaligned cluster. Get the alignment right and its one access per cluster, and the drive actually performs pretty well. Next time, WD might make life simpler by ditching the 512 byte sector emulation, and trusting the user's operating system to actually work with 4096 byte sectors.
Oh yeah, turn off the Caviar Green's "auto head parking" "feature" as well, as under Linux the drive parks and unparks its heads about every 8 seconds, as the default "sleep" time for the drive seems to be marginally less than Linux's average time between disk accesses.
but can I put my ,.,., in it?
I use my 2TB drive as a backup device, using rsync-backup. A nightly backup of 400GB takes around 20 minutes (after the first time), I always have the current revision available and nightly snapshots going back for as long as I want. So far, 6 months of nightly backups has consumed around 600GB. When I run out of space, in a few years time, I'll just buy a 10TB drive (or whatever is available) and keep going.
Seagate used to be top of the line as far as hard drives were concerned but these past few years have shown a drop in quality. My 1.5 Tb Seagate started acting flakey last summer so I ordered a Hitachi as a replacement while Seagate sent me a refurb drive. We'll see how long the Hitachi lasts.
Back when 80Gb drives first came out I ordered one from Maxtor. Months later it started acting up and they sent me a replacement, which died not long afterward. A few drives later they sent me a brand new retail kit. At this point I knew enough to run the Maxtor diags before even formatting the drives. Well the diags said this drive was also bad. Yes I did run diags on different boxes to rule out a bad motherboard or cable. I decided it wasn't worth the $8 to send back drive number 6 (yes SIX) and bought a Seagate instead which is still in use today.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I worked out (exhaustively) the cost of storing backups on both tape and NAS in our datacentres. Ignoring compression, it turned out that LTO-5 tape libraries worked out just cheaper than 2Tb drives in a NAS JBOD configuration. The electrical cost of keeping all those discs idling barely made a difference, but there was also the cost of rack space to consider. With 3Tb drives, the balance tips back the other way again.
n/t
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
https://sites.google.com/site/apt4vn/
Children, children, you are both right.
Aside from their shock-resistance, I'm interested in SSD's for their reported energy efficiency compared to traditional platter-based magnetic disks. The power consumption part of the tests has interesting numbers on power usage that show traditional mobile hard drives being competitive to SSD's.
The most energy efficient 128 GB Kingston SSDNow draws a mere 0.2 watt when idle, but not much higher is the 750GB WD Scorpio Blue, which draws 0.4. On load, the numbers go up to 1.1 and 2.0 watts respectively, less than a watt of difference.
Are smaller (-1.8") SSD's more efficient than notebook-sized (2.5") SSD's? Besides the shock resistance, does an SSD offer that much of an advantage over a traditional HD when packed inside a tablet or smaller form factor computing device?
This is an interesting development
: I personally feel that all the companies are going in for consolidation. And the biggest gainers are the small companies or the ones who have this as side business... Everyone is consolidating and almost every tech company want to get into the Cloud computing space...thats heating up bigtime. Karan Mehta www.iwebsnacks.com
Meta troll FTW!
Is it just an impression, or has hard drive technology hit some kind of ceiling. Those two 3TB drives have been available for over a year and there's no other identical or bigger model on the horizon. It used to be that you had a 50% increase every 6 months On the one hand I have a hunch that all the 5Tb pre-series and 10Tb prototypes are going to Google data warehouses, on the other hand I think that research budgets now go to SSDs. So what gives ?
Non-Linux Penguins ?
I really don't care that they have hit a ceiling. Either way, I probably won't go over 1 or 2 TB with my HDDs, since a physical failure implies far more files to recover. A well planned RAID + Backup system seems more interesting than wanting some 10TB drives I think.
possibly may work for Samsung, be Samsung's mum, etc (j/k)
are you by any chance a terminal hoarder of hard drives, who will only quit doing it when your house undergoes gravitational collapse under the weight of all those drives?
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