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3TB Hard Drives Square Off Against Everything Else

Posted by Soulskill on from the it's-not-the-size-of-the-platter-it's-the-motion-of-the-actuator dept.

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."

4 of 160 comments (clear)

  1. You're Wrong. by DWMorse · · Score: 5, Informative

    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?
  2. too late for wikipedia by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    lol.. someone tell the super-aspergers at wikipedia they dont need to delete knowledge anymore... we have 3TB harddrives now...

  3. 512/4096 sector alignment? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  4. Re:Does anyone make a reliable drive now? by White+Flame · · Score: 5, Informative

    We do have real data on that subject. Google did extensive recording of their hard drive failures a few years ago, and they go through piles and piles of HDs.

    Verdict: No significant variation in failure rates between HD manufacturers.