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Review of Seagate's 750Gb Hard Drive

Posted by Zonk on Tue May 30, 2006 10:06 AM
from the raid-array-in-a-box dept.
Data Storage Hardware Technology
Zoxed writes "The Tech Report have a comprehensive review of Seagate's Barracuda-7200.10 'perpendicular' drive, including a primer on the technology. They ran performance tests against 10 other drives, checking the noise and power consumption levels. The Seagate fared pretty well, even on cost (per Gigabyte)." From the article: "Perpendicular recording does wonders for storage capacity, and thanks to denser platters, it can also improve drive performance. Couple those benefits with support for 300 MB/s Serial ATA transfer rates, Native Command Queuing, and up to 16 MB of cache, and the Barracuda 7200.10 starts to look pretty appealing. Throw in an industry-leading five year warranty and a cost per gigabyte that's competitive with 500 GB drives, and you may quickly find yourself scrambling to justify a need for 750 GB of storage capacity."
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[+] Seagate Announces 750GB Hard Drives 532 comments
Hack Jandy writes "Seagate documents have leaked out the two 750GB 7200.10 Barracuda hard drives. The drives are the first desktop hard drives to use perpendicular recording, feature a 16MB cache and 7200RPM spindle."
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Review of Seagate's 750Gb Hard Drive 50 Comments More /

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  • The justification for more space (Score:5, Funny)

    by Dude McDude (938516) on Tuesday May 30 2006, @10:10AM (#15428321)
    One word: PORN

  • Scrambling? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by _Hellfire_ (170113) on Tuesday May 30 2006, @10:11AM (#15428328) Homepage
    "...and you may quickly find yourself scrambling to justify a need for 750 GB of storage capacity."

    With the amount of media stored on my server I can already justify a disk this size. The only downside is of course that you're going to need two of these for your mirror :(

    • Re:Scrambling? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by ericdano (113424) on Tuesday May 30 2006, @10:30AM (#15428456) Homepage
      Which bring up the question, do existing RAID controllers support this drive?

      And, do firewire enclosures support them?

      • Re:Scrambling? (Score:5, Informative)

        by drinkypoo (153816) <martin.espinoza@gmail.com> on Tuesday May 30 2006, @11:03AM (#15428708) Homepage Journal
        Any firewire bridge that has the right interface to speak to the drive should be able to talk to it just fine. This isn't the old dark days of DOS where you needed extender software just to talk to fancy new drives. Since drives use logical geometry to talk to the host adapter, this just isn't an issue any more.

      • Re:Scrambling? (Score:5, Informative)

        by Fweeky (41046) on Tuesday May 30 2006, @11:03AM (#15428710) Homepage
        Anything supporting LBA48 should handle it just fine, although we're rapidly approaching the 2TB limit many controllers have on a single disk/array. LBA48 supports drives up to 128PB (512 byte blocks * 2^48), but of course we're still in a largely 32bit world, so it's more like 512*2^32 unless you're careful.

  • Get perpendicular :D (Score:5, Informative)

    by LiquidCoooled (634315) on Tuesday May 30 2006, @10:13AM (#15428341) Homepage Journal

    http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/research/recording_h ead/pr/PerpendicularAnimation.html [hitachigst.com]

    Watch out for the superparamagnetic effect though.

    • Re:Get perpendicular :D (Score:5, Insightful)

      by edzillion (842353) on Tuesday May 30 2006, @10:41AM (#15428532)
      Did you notice that the ipod-like mp3 player the character was holding said 1 of 30,000 songs. 30 thousand! Does anyone else get the feeling of overload with this avalanche of content? I have noticed that the more music I have ripped on my pc the less I listen to each song. If consumers are said to empathise with their purchases - for instance it has been noted that people value items more when they own them - then having 30k songs or 50k episodes of the daily show surely means that each will get less attention. In these circumstances I find it hard to believe that these items will still hold their value.

      • Re:Get perpendicular :D (Score:5, Insightful)

        by WuphonsReach (684551) on Tuesday May 30 2006, @11:13AM (#15428792)
        Well... 750GB (let's say 700GB once we remove the overhead) holds:

        200 DVD movies (3.5GB each) or 100 DVD9 movies
        500 days of music (128kbps)
        1400 TV episodes (44 min, MPEG4)
        500 HDTV episodes (MPEG4, 1.4GB/show)

        So yes, we're probably getting past that point with music, but not with video yet.

        And, IIRC, Project Gutenberg has something like 300-400GB of text files in their library.

      • TIVO is already making a hash of the 'free television' model.

        What happens when someone can have locally an mp3 playlist that rivals that of a local radio station? At least with TV, there is a constant flow of new content - good radio stations too. But most radio is just replaying over and over a list of probably well under 300 songs, with a weekly turnover of what, 5% or less?

      • Re:Get perpendicular :D (Score:5, Insightful)

        by hackstraw (262471) * on Tuesday May 30 2006, @12:06PM (#15429207) Homepage
        I have noticed that the more music I have ripped on my pc the less I listen to each song.

        Duh. Especially if you have it on random play, the odds of it being hit, are, well lower with the more content you have.

        There is the 90/10 or 80/20 or 99/1 or whatever rules, depending on the situation, but what those guys say is that 90% of the time you will be listening to 10% of the material you have.

        Its generally true. However, its still good to have those other 90% laying around for those times when you "really need them".

        Other rough examples. You read 10% of your books 90% of the time. 99% of the world's money is owned by 1% of the population. 90-95% of the alcohol consumed in the US is drank by 5-10% of the population. 95% of my complaints/problems/issues from my users comes from 5% of them. Etc, etc, etc.

  • Whoah (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MobileTatsu-NJG (946591) on Tuesday May 30 2006, @10:13AM (#15428344)
    "Throw in an industry-leading five year warranty..."

    Wow, thought those days were gone.

    • Re:Whoah (Score:5, Informative)

      by Martin Blank (154261) on Tuesday May 30 2006, @10:29AM (#15428448) Journal
      You just have to look for them a bit. I just picked up a 300GB Maxtor SATA-2 with 16MB cache and NCQ that has a 5-year warranty, and it only cost me about $6 more than the 3-year warranty version with identical specs. Other companies may also offer them. (Of course, Maxtor is now a part of Seagate.)

  • Myth boxes and the like (Score:5, Insightful)

    by debest (471937) on Tuesday May 30 2006, @10:16AM (#15428364)
    Some keep saying that there's no point to ever-increasing drive storage numbers. I disagree. Huge drives will always be appreciated in media PCs, where good-quality video (even if compressed) takes up a good chunk of storage space. Since these devices are preferably low noise, low power, and small in size, you obviously can't just keep throwing more drives in the box: a single drive is the best solution.

    Keep the size increases coming, I've got a mountain of content on DVD and VHS that I'd love to be able to rip to an online media library!

  • Uh... no (Score:3, Insightful)

    by 93 Escort Wagon (326346) on Tuesday May 30 2006, @10:19AM (#15428382)
    "Throw in an industry-leading five year warranty and a cost per gigabyte that's competitive with 500 GB drives, and you may quickly find yourself scrambling to justify a need for 750 GB of storage capacity."

    Maybe I hang around with normal people a bit too much, but I can't see myself getting hot and bothered over a new hard drive. If you need the capacity, then sure - this is great. But c'mon! As far as the "lust after" quotient goes, this isn't exactly in the same league as some new piece of Apple hardware. Heck, it's probably not even in the same league as a low-end Dell box.

  • only 187 million times cheaper per bit (Score:5, Funny)

    by Ancient_Hacker (751168) on Tuesday May 30 2006, @10:25AM (#15428418)
    $413 sounds a bit pricey, but then I thought back to my fiurst disk srive, a DEC DF-32. Only 32,768 12-bit words!

    Price I don't know, definitely no less than $5000 of 1972 dollars. That's about 78 bits per dollar.

    This new disk is about 14634146341.463414634146341463415 bits per dollar that's an improvement of about 187 million times .

    but wait those old dolalrs were at least 4 times more studly than today's, so that's about 600 million times better over the last 34 years. An annual rate of about 183% !

    • Re:only 187 million times cheaper per bit (Score:5, Informative)

      by WuphonsReach (684551) on Tuesday May 30 2006, @12:01PM (#15429169)
      $413 sounds pricey until, as you noted, you do the math for the $/GB amount. For being a leading-edge drive, the price per GB is rather competitive.

      The following prices are estimates based on www.pricescan.com [pricescan.com]. There could be as much as +/- 10% variation in prices.

      PATA drive prices
      120GB $64 - $0.53/GB
      160GB $70 - $0.44/GB
      200GB $75 - $0.38/GB
      250GB $80 - $0.32/GB
      300GB $105 - $0.35/GB
      400GB $195 - $0.49/GB
      500GB $260 - $0.52/GB
      750GB $490 - $0.65/GB

      SATA Drive prices ($/GB)
      120GB $68 - $0.57/GB
      160GB $65 - $0.41/GB
      200GB $76 - $0.38/GB
      250GB $80 - $0.32/GB
      300GB $105 - $0.35/GB
      400GB $175 - $0.44/GB
      500GB $250 - $0.50/GB
      750GB $434 - $0.58/GB

  • its funny... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Connie_Lingus (317691) <markenriquez&yahoo,com> on Tuesday May 30 2006, @10:37AM (#15428509) Homepage
    ..but those 5-year warrenties don't really help you much if you FORGET THE BACKUP THE FRIGGING DRIVE!

    customer: "my drive failed...i would like it replaced"

    company: "sure..here is your new one!"

    customer: "uhhh...what happened to my data?"
  • This drive increases the ever widening gap between available storage and backup media. Great I can buy a 750GB drive...however how the hell am I gonna back this thing up...actually even with many many dics how am I gonna backup 750GB. There is a huge disparity in the amount of data we can store these days and the stuff we have to back it up. There is no afforadable backup solution for this much data.
    • RAID-5 [or 6]. If you're running something where you have 750GB of information chances are you can justify spending 2-3K on reliable storage.

      3x750 in RAID-5 would net you about 1.3TiB of storage and would allow upto one drive to completely die without losing data. If you're more paranoid you could use 4x750 and have upto two drives die.

      The RAID access will be automatic so effectively you're always backing data up.

      Tom
      • Raid 5, in most applications means that if one drive fails you have no problems. If a second drive fails before the dead drive is replaced & rebuilt, you are screwed.

        Raid 5 with spare(might be called 6 in some vendors terminology), is almost unseen outside the enterprise (read real raid controller, not home nas-box, or home-pc) means if one drive fails that drive will be rebuilt on the spare drive. If a second drive fails before that happens: HEHEHEHEHE (can you say $$$ to ontrack?)

        In either case, a po
    • Buy 2 drives, use the second one for backup.

      Put it in a USB adapter and use rysync.
      Quick, easy, cheap.

  • High-definition MythTV box is *wonderful* (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Yeechang Lee (3429) on Tuesday May 30 2006, @11:20AM (#15428857) Homepage
    Some keep saying that there's no point to ever-increasing drive storage numbers. I disagree. Huge drives will always be appreciated in media PCs, where good-quality video (even if compressed) takes up a good chunk of storage space.

    As the owner of a MythTV box equipped with dual HD cable boxes (*and* fortunate enough to have a cable provider that doesn't 5C encode its HD premium movie channels) and a HD over-the-air capture card, all of which I can use simultaneously, I can testify to that.

    Here's my experience with bandwidth use:
    * Digital non-HDTV channels generate the smallest files at about 900-1000MB/hour for a movie channel and up to 1200MB/hour for a cartoon (with probably a lower-quality feed).
    * Analog channels such as TCM generate about 2900MB/hour due to the extra noise.
    * HDTV premium movie channels generate about 4400MB-4700MB/hour.
    * A high-bandwidth HDTV channel (defined as HDNet or Discovery HD Theater and most network affiliates over cable or over-the-air) generates 7400-7700MB/hour . . .
    * Except for ABC and Fox, whose 720p programs record at about 5.8GB/hour.

    On the MythTV box's dedicated NAS, I have (according to MythWeb) 176 programs, using 1.6 TB (324 hrs 32 mins) out of 1.8 TB (111 GB free). Almost all of the programs are high-definition movies. Examples:

    * The Untouchables, 125 minutes, 16GB
    * St. Elmo's Fire, 120 minutes, 15GB
    * Shakespeare in Love, 125 minutes, 16GB
    * Ben-Hur, 215 minutes, 15GB
    * The Matrix Revolutions, 135 minutes, 11GB
    * A Passage to India, 165 minutes, 21GB
    * La Bamba, 110 minutes, 14GB
    * Mona Lisa Smile, 120 minutes, 6.1GB (Commercials transencoded out)
    * Spider-Man 2, 135 minutes, 12GB
    * Batman Begins, 150 minutes, 11GB
    * Seabiscuit, 180 minutes, 10GB (Commercials transencoded out)
    * Witness, 115 minutes, 11GB
    * The Passion of the Christ, 135 minutes, 9.8GB
    * The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, 205 minutes, 19GB
    * Doctor Zhivago, 215 minutes, 14GB
    * Emma, 129 minutes, 12GB
    * Bye Bye Birdie, 124 minutes, 16GB
    * Giant, 204 minutes, 26GB
    * GoodFellas, 154 minutes, 12GB
    * Bullitt, 124 minutes, 16GB
    * Real Genius, 119 minutes, 11GB
    * Pulp Fiction, 164 minutes, 12GB

    . . . etc., etc. Many of the larger-sized films were recorded off of HDnet Movies, which is an especial godsend for any movie lover. (I *can't wait* for the day TCM starts broadcasting in HD!) My all-time champion, now unfortunately lost in a box rebuild, was NBC's The Sound of Music annual broadcast. Four hours, including commercials, and 28GB!
  • Solar scientific data is growing too large to handle. The SOHO [nasa.gov] data are almost small enough to ship around by internet (the whole dataset is something like 20-30 TB for 10 years of operation), though data mining and such are starting to fall back on SneakerNet as the SDAC [nasa.gov] is shipping around terabyte lunchbox drives as their preferred method of bulk data export.

    But Solar Dynamics Observatory [nasa.gov], which is currently being built, will generate about 3 TB of data per day. We're all a little worried about how to distribute, store, and use such vast quantities of data. Perpendicular-storage drives like these just might save the day...

     
    • How far are you distributing this data? Is it going places Internet2 doesn't go? Is it prohibitively expensive to hop on to Internet2, given the budgets of these sorts of projects?

      Seems to me that needing to distribute this kind of data is _exactly_ the sort of impetus needed to kickstart next generation internet infrastructure. Of course, this does nothing for storage problems.....

      One should be able to get ~ 1Gb/sec over fiber. Conservatively, assuming 500Mb/sec real throughput, that means 12 hours in tran
    • You've never heard of this thing called a "backup", I take it?

      Seriously, there is no reason whatsoever for anyone to lose any data. Even if it means forking over the money for a tape backup and tapes, if you lose any data due to a drive failure you have no one to blame but yourself. If it's important, build a RAID. If its critical, build a RAID with some kind of tape or other backup.

      Yeah, I know, this is "Well, no shit, Sherlock" territory, but it always irks me when someone talks about losing data because there's no real need for losing any data, particularly if it's important.

      Of course, if getting that data back is a simple task of downloading (again) from alt.binaries.multimedia.erotica, that's a different situation. :)

      • Re:Now all I need...is a backup perhaps? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by gid13 (620803) on Tuesday May 30 2006, @10:34AM (#15428481)
        "there is no reason whatsoever for anyone to lose any data. Even if it means forking over the money"

        Psst... Money is a reason.
        • Then you shouldn't be buying such a large hard drive if you can't afford to lose the data that's on it without redundancy or archiving capabilities. That's like buying a luxury car when you can't afford insurance for it.
        • Money is only a valid reason if the data is worth LESS than the cost of a backup solution. In many cases, the nominal cost of a backup solution is far less than the value of the data on the computer.

          Someone may say "I can't afford a new $80 drive to back up my data." But when they lose years of family photos and other documents, that $80 doesn't seem like so much compared to the hundreds or thousands of dollars it costs to do data recovery on a broken hard drive.

        • Re:Now all I need...is a backup perhaps? (Score:4, Insightful)

          by LurkerXXX (667952) on Tuesday May 30 2006, @12:07PM (#15429213)
          RAID is not a backup. Say it with me. RAID is not a backup.

          Not only won't RAID save you from a "rm -rf /", it won't save you if your power supply dies in an ugly way and takes all your attached components with it, your power line gets hit by lightening, and fries everything attached to that outlet, your house/biz gets burgled and they take the computer, you accidently delete a critical file you really need or realize you need it later, etc, etc, etc.

          RAID is not a backup.

          A backup is an offline copy that you can store at an off-site location just in case one of many many 'bad things' happen.

          RAID is simply a way of increasing your uptime in case a single component fails. It's not a backup.

    • Re:Big HUGE warnings - Not quite true (Score:5, Insightful)

      by drhamad (868567) on Tuesday May 30 2006, @10:23AM (#15428405) Homepage
      7x100GB is not 7 times more reliable than one 750 GB drive. It is 7x more reliable at not losing ALL of your data, perhaps, since you could only lose 100GB at a time. But it is not any more reliable for retaining ALL of your data, either. The big advantage in reliability to high capacity drives is the ability to RAID them in a relatively small enclosure - RAIDing 7 or 8 drives would be quite a task, while doing 2-4 drives is relatively easy.

      • RAIDing 7 or 8 drives would be quite a task, while doing 2-4 drives is relatively easy.

        For those who don't see the difference: Most boxes don't have controller capacity for more than four drives (two PATA channels and two SATA channels) and seven or eight drives will also strain your PSU and your cooling capacity. Might be hard to fit in your case, too.

        Of course, once you solve those problems, actually setting up the RAID is no different whether you have three drives or 30. A little more typing, maybe.

        My file server has six disks in it, BTW, so I've worked through all of this. I can easily add a seventh without any trouble. An eighth would require a new controller card. I'm not sure how many drives I can add before my 550W PSU starts to have trouble. My cooling solution is low-tech, loud and very effective: The side of the case is off and I have a 30-inch box fan (the kind you mount in a window to cool your house) blowing into it.

        One nifty trick I discovered is that if you slice all of your disks up into many small partitions, then create many RAID-5 arrays (using partition 1 on each disk to create the first array, etc.), then use LVM to bind all the arrays together you can add additional disks and rebuild the arrays without having to find some way to back up all of the data first.

        I just added a 500GB drive to my system and I'm in the process of changing all of my four-disk RAID-5 arrays to five-disk RAID-5 arrays. The process works like this:

        1. Use pvmove to migrate all of the data off of an existing four-disk array.
        2. Use vgreduce to remove the now-unused array from the volume group.
        3. Use pvremove to remove the LVM superblock from the array.
        4. Use mdadm to stop the array and clear the md superblocks on the partitions.
        5. Use mdadm to construct a new five-disk array from the four partitions that made up the old array, plus a fifth partition from the new disk.
        6. Use pvcreate to add an LVM superblock to the array.
        7. Use vgextend to add the array into the volume group.
        8. Go back to step 1 with the next four-disk array, until they've all been converted.

        This assumes Linux, obviously, is a bit tedious and requires that your LVM volume have enough free space so you can drop an array out of it. It's a whole lot easier than trying to figure out how to back up a TB+ of data so that you can rebuild your array, though. In my case, there's an additional step right after step four -- because my new drive is SATA and Linux doesn't support more than 15 partitions on an SATA drive, I'm moving from using 20GB partitions to 40GB partitions. So after I kill each pair of four-disk arrays, I repartition the drive to merge the partitions.

        Let me tell you... repartitioning all of the disks holding my data made me more than a little nervous at first :-) I kept backups of the partition tables, just in case, but it actually worked just fine. Next time, though, I think I'll just create a single partition and use LVM to chop it into pieces which I can RAID together. So I'll have LVM over RAID over LVM. Sounds weird, but it makes a lot of practical sense.

            • you need to order new drives and ship them overnight as soon as you have problems.

              Not only that, but you NEED a hot spare. If you have a RAID made up of a bunch of the same drive, and one fails, it should be a warning sign to you. The other drives are substantially the same as that one, and they should now be considered likely to fail, unless it failed WELL within the MTBF window.

    • Re:Big HUGE warnings (Score:5, Informative)

      by Dan Ost (415913) on Tuesday May 30 2006, @10:24AM (#15428413)
      No, this isn't true. If the failure rate of drives is constant (pretty close to reality), then
      if you've got 7 drives and I've got 1, you're seven times more likely to lose a drive than
      I am.

      Granted, you only lose 1/7th if your drive fails, and I lose all of it, but since we're both
      making backups (you ARE making backups, right?), you're paying 7 times the space, electricity,
      heat, and noise costs for less reliable storage than I am. Assuming that we both run out systems
      long enough for drives to fail, you're also paying 7 times as much of your time replacing drives
      than I am.

      What sense does that make?

      • Bad math.. (Score:5, Informative)

        by JMZero (449047) on Tuesday May 30 2006, @10:31AM (#15428461) Homepage
        If you've got 7 drives and I've got 1, you're seven times more likely to lose a drive than
        I am.

        Let's say each drive has a 20% chance of failing. So if you have seven of them, do you have a 140% chance of one failing? Of course not. What you really have is 80%^7 percent chance of them all remaining OK. 80%^7 = 21%. Thus you have around a 79% chance of failure with 7 drives (if they all have 20% failure rate).

        Your point still stands - but I noticed pretty much all of the replies to this guy used the same bad math.

        • Re:Bad math.. (Score:5, Informative)

          by pla (258480) on Tuesday May 30 2006, @11:01AM (#15428688) Journal
          Thus you have around a 79% chance of failure with 7 drives (if they all have 20% failure rate).

          IF you have a 20% failure rate.

          It cheats somewhat to use that as an example, however, because with the real probabilities involved, you approach a linear trend with the number of drives.

          Let's try an MBTF of 50k hours. That gives us a 0.002% chance of failure per hour. Take 0.99998 to the seventh, and we get 0.9998600084... Or "seven times as likely", accurate to better than one part in a thousand.


          Though, I will admit doubt that the GP explicitly took that into consideration in his statement. ;-)
          • Not true, if you flip a coin 3 times are you 3 times as likely to get a tail. i.e. do you have a 150% chance of getting at least one tail? no you have 1 - 0.5^3 = 1 - 0.125 = 87.5% chance. There is 12.5% chance that you would get no tails. With drive failure it works the same way, you have a chance at no failures and also a chance of multiple failures.

            7 times as many failures (over a large number of samples) is not the same as 7 times the chance to have a failure.

    • Because with only 2, there is *less* risk of engine failure.

      Having 7 drives increases your risk of failure by a factor of seven. Unless you mirror every drive, but then, you now have 14 disks v 2...
      • Plus who has room (and power) in their case for 7 drives? Datacenters, sure, but not home users.
        I've seen cheap ($30) mid-tower cases that had about 8 internal 3.5" drive bays -- they just had the mounting rails go the entire height of the case. Combine that with a decent power supply and you're set.

        I just wish they made high-quality cases with that many drive bays, but I haven't found any for some reason.

    • Re:That's a lot of DVDs (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ericdano (113424) on Tuesday May 30 2006, @10:36AM (#15428500) Homepage
      As in getting TWO of them, and mirroring them. When you get into 100s of Gigabytes, it doesn't make sense to use DVDs (right now, unless you have BluRay or something) to make backups. Get another drive of the same size, or two of them, and mirror them.

    • Re:Well... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by CharlieHedlin (102121) on Tuesday May 30 2006, @10:55AM (#15428642)
      So you just doubled your power requirements, heat output and chance of failure. I would much rather have 2 750GB drives with Raid 1.

      I just wish there was an affordable removable media alternative. If I want to have 750GB of storage I have to buy it twice, probably 3 times (online raid 1 for reliability, and an offline drive for backups). In a datacenter enviroment, a nice robotic LTO2 system helps, but I can buy a lot of hard drives for the price of one of those.

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