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Terabyte Hard Drive Put To the Test
Posted by
Zonk
on Mon Aug 13, 2007 03:15 AM
from the where-did-the-missing-69-gigs-go dept.
from the where-did-the-missing-69-gigs-go dept.
EconolineCrush writes "As a technical milestone, Hitachi's Deskstar 7K1000 hard drive is undeniably impressive. The drive is the first to pack a trillion bytes into a standard 3.5" form factor, and while some may argue the merits of tebi versus tera, that's still an astounding accomplishment. Hitachi also outfitted the drive with 32MB of cache—double what you get with standard desktop drives—making this latest Deskstar a leader in both cache size and total capacity. That looks like a great formula for success on paper, but how does it pan out in the real world? The Tech Report has tested the 7K1000's performance, noise levels, and power consumption against 18 other drives to find out, with surprising results."
Related Stories
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The First Terabyte Hard Drive Reviewed 495 comments
mikemuch writes "ExtremeTech has a review and benchmarks of the Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 1TB Hard Drive, which ushers in the terabyte age. It performs well on HDTach and PCMark benchmarks, though not as speedily as professional-grade drives. It could be just the ticket for digital media junkies. 'One of the first issues to note is that you may not see an actual one terabyte capacity on your system. First, the formatted capacity is always less than the raw space available on the drive. Directory information and formatting data always take up some space. Second, the hard drive industry's definition of a megabyte differs from the rest of the PC business. One megabyte of hard drive space is 1,000,000 bytes: 10^6 bytes. Operating systems calculate one megabyte as 2^20 bytes, or 1,048,576 bytes. Once installed and set up, Hitachi's 1TB hard drive offers up an actual formatted capacity of about 935GB, as measured by the OS. That's still a lot of space, by anyone's definition.'" Update: 05/17 21:52 GMT by Z : Adding '^s' missing from article.
[+]
New Water-Cooled Hard Drives Coming 145 comments
CoolHandLuke writes "NEC and Hitachi are teaming up on a liquid cooling system for hard drives. The goal is to cut down on noise levels while providing more efficient cooling. 'Hitachi and NEC are developing the water-cooled hard drive systems for desktop computers mainly to reduce noise levels to 25 decibels, 5 decibels quieter than a whisper. To do this, NEC and Hitachi actually wrap the hard drive in "noise absorbing material and vibration insulation." According to Hitachi and NEC, the cooling cold plate they're planning to use is the most efficient plate ever used for heat conduction, which means they'll be able to cool the hard drives quicker and more efficiently.'"
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Test? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Test? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Test? (Score:5, Funny)
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kanashhk shhk shhk (Score:5, Funny)
I love the sound of head crashes in the morning. Smells like... a coffee break.
Re:kanashhk shhk shhk (Score:5, Funny)
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RAID 5 Please (Score:5, Funny)
RAID 6 Please (Score:4, Interesting)
For example a 3ware 9650SE-8LPML can be had for as little $520.
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Re:RAID 6 Please (Score:4, Informative)
Also, linux-md doesn't guarantee ordering, which hardware-raid cards, as they're intended for use with oracle and friends, do.
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Re:RAID 6 Please (Score:5, Interesting)
The Adaptec and LSI Megaraid cards are truly heinous. Just last week I had a system that wouldn't boot because the megaraid card decided that the NVRAM and on-disk settings didn't match... Even though the "force boot" option was set. Force-boot is supposed to write the on-disk config to nvram on a mismatch. As often as not, a machine with a megaraid card crashes on a single-disk failure instead of continuing to operate minus one disk. It'll reboot fine but not before you lose the unwritten data and deal with filesystem corruption. And God help you if a second disk develops a bad spot... It won't do the best it can to rebuild; it'll simply flunk leaving the good portions of the data unrecoverable.
I'll match Linux MD against those cards for reliability purposes any day. I wish there was some hardware I could buy that enhanced it with a battery-backed cache and parity acceleration. Then I could throw away the megaraid and adaptec cards.
The SmartArray cards are actually very good. Expensive as hell, but good. Sadly the primary configuration utility is on a CD instead of in the bios and some goober at HP decided to rig the disc so it won't boot on any hardware that's not HP/Compaq. Fortunately you can boot Knoppix, copy the linux config utilities and configure it that way.
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Re:RAID 5 Please (Score:5, Funny)
That's 85-125 USD for your entire collection in one single copy.
Or make that a nice round 200$ for two sets of copies.
So, where can I get two 1.5 TB HDDs for 100$ each ?
Sure, the "seek time" would suck, but then again who cares, it's porn, not like you'll die if you wait 15 more seconds before you start looking at it... or are you ?
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Re:RAID 5 Please (Score:5, Funny)
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Perpendicular (Score:4, Funny)
Ah, its finally here.
I remember reading about this like 4 years ago.
Cool.
Re:Perpendicular (Score:4, Interesting)
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it's been here for a while (Score:4, Interesting)
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whoops (Score:4, Insightful)
i think they meant 24 megabytes, which is easy to scoff at now, but wasn't when the first gigabyte drives dropped.
The author has some problems with his arithmetic (Score:5, Informative)
tebi? shut up. 1 terabyte drive still NOT here (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:tebi? shut up. 1 terabyte drive still NOT here (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:tebi? shut up. 1 terabyte drive still NOT here (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:tebi? shut up. 1 terabyte drive still NOT here (Score:5, Insightful)
Every time I see a wikipedia page with MiB or mebibyte or whatever the heck, I want to change--fix--it!
e.g..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voodoo2 [wikipedia.org]
Parent
The value of consistent nomenclature (Score:5, Insightful)
Look, I hate marketing dishonesty as much as the next guy, but borrowing the SI prefixes honestly does nothing but add confusion. Hard drives are easy, because one can safely assume that the marketing 'tards went with whatever number was bigger. But what about my phone's data plan? Aside from the whole kB vs kb thing, how do I know which definition of "kilo" my provider has gone with? Do they consider themselves with the "computer industry" or with the rest of the world? And (this is the best question), will the not-very-well-paid support grunt even know the difference?
Would you like it if you agreed to sell a dozen POS systems to a bakery, only to be told after the contract, "Sorry sir. This is the baking industry. You agreed to give us thirteen systems." Or if you got a $30 bill from your ISP with the explanation, "This is the computer industry. Though our adverts say this plan is $30 a month, that's hex. In base-ten dollars, you owe us $48."
You hate marketing people skewing reality. Good. It is only through fighting ambiguity that they can be stopped from getting away with this.
Do you know the difference between a pipe and a tube? If you get into any business involving either, I hope you don't repurpose the words everyone else has settled upon.
It's that extra bit of humility that really makes your post shine.Parent
Ok... but 992, 977, 1023, 1011, 973 or 1005? (Score:5, Insightful)
But instead of going with whatever number that fits their specific field, they all went with 1000. Really, that IT people refuse to do the same makes us look utterly retarded.
Not that it matters anyway. With 8 bits on the byte, we're doomed before we even start. There is no hope in sight until we just ditch this shit, get a clue from the network people, and start counting bits in multiples of 1000.
Parent
Re:Ok... but 992, 977, 1023, 1011, 973 or 1005? (Score:5, Informative)
Are those "long" tons (2240lb), "short" tons (2000lb), or "metric" tons (1000kg)?
Ambiguous terms of measurement do exist outside of the computer industry, too -- which, I should point out, is actually "the software development industry" plus "the hardware manufacturing industry" plus "the IT service industry" and so forth.
Drive manufacturers have always used base-10 prefixes to describe the capacity of winchester drives. It's not a marketing ploy, it's historic convention.
Parent
Re:tebi? shut up. 1 terabyte drive still NOT here (Score:5, Interesting)
Let us take your absolutism to its logical conclusion.
Prima: I've got a huge car!
Secunda: Dude, I've got a huge cat!
* SUV-sized cat walks in.
Prima: Dude!
Secunda: (looking to camera) No, you see, "big" is an adjective, and must be read in the context of the noun it describes. A big cat is not the same size as a big car, or a big house, or a big boat. Prima: I see what you're saying. Similarly, a "kilo-gram" is prefixing the gram, a base-10 system, thus 10^3 grams; while a "kilo-byte", prefixing the byte, part of a base-2 system, refers to 2^10 bytes?
Secunda: Exactly! Humans, complex machines that they are, make use of context to bring out meaning.
Prima: But on Wikipedia it says this use is incorrect?
Secunda: Well, Wikipedia has the quality of a scientific journal... assuming submissions to scientific journals were all accepted for publication, and could be edited by anyone at any time.
Prima: So, the individual or group with the most amount of time ends up producing the predominant content?
Secunda: Exactly! The best way to confirm whether an article is likely to be useless is to read its talk page; in fact, you are more likely to learn from this page, as it illustrates the points of contention that one side or the other has tried to suppress.
Prima: So for the past two decades we have called 1024 bytes a "kilobyte", until one standards body associated with manufacturers of hard drives decided to redefine it...?
Secunda: Precisely. Worse, the previously unambiguous (outside of hard drive manufacturing) "kilobyte" is now defined as "1000 bytes". It'd be like renaming the mile to the "iMile", then stipulating that all future uses of "mile" should be based on the origin of the word - i.e. one thousand double paces.
Prima: But paces vary from person to person - it's like you're making an arbitrary change based in a tenuous argument that goes against the principle that language evolves other than by edict!
Secunda: Now you're getting the hang of it. Have you considered becoming a Wikipedia editor?
Tercera: Listen you two, either shut up or get a room.
Prima: Let's get some beer.
Secunda: Word.
* SUV-sized cat disappears in a puff of semantics, replaced with a slightly overweight puddytat.
Parent
Power-of-10 prefixes are the norm in IT (Score:5, Informative)
-
A 128 kbit/s audio stream is 128 * 10^3 bit/s (power of 10)
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A 100 Mbit/s ethernet card is 100 * 10^6 bit/s (power of 10)
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A 480 Mbit/s USB2 link is 480 * 10^6 bit/s (power of 10)
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A 500 GByte disk is 500 * 10^9 bytes (power of 10)
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A 56 kbaud modem is 56 * 10^3 baud/s (power of 10)
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A 1.5 GHz processor is 1.5 * 10^9 Hz (power of 10)
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A 6 Mbit/s DSL line is 6 * 10^6 bit/s (power of 10)
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A 650 MByte CD is 650 * 10^6 bytes (power of 10)
It is a total mystery to me why people think that power-of-2 prefixes should be the norm, when the only few places where they are used are to refer to the size of files and RAM sticks.Spread the truth. Mod me informative
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Re:Power-of-10 prefixes are the norm in IT (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:tebi? shut up. 1 terabyte drive still NOT here (Score:5, Insightful)
- When you say 1KB, the difference is 2.4% or 24 bytes.
- When you say 1MB, the difference is 4.8% or 48KB.
- When you say 1GB, the difference is 7.4% or 74MB.
- When you say 1TB, the difference is 10% or 100GB.
So, the higher the capacity, the more difference is there between binary and decimal units. 2.4% difference is significant enough, but it's not as bad as 10%. Lacking 100GB, or a full tenth of the capacity is however quite noticeable.Parent
Visit our site! (Score:4, Funny)
Come on! Just tell us what the results were directly, don't make us have to break Slashdot law and RTFA!
Re:Visit our site! (Score:5, Informative)
It has huge capacity - check.
It is noisy and sucks power - check.
It is not a speed champion - check.
Not exactly surprising for the first 1TB drive on the market.
Parent
Conclusion in the article: (Score:5, Informative)
Fills up too fast anyways (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Fills up too fast anyways (Score:5, Funny)
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Meaningful tests? (Score:5, Insightful)
And if they're really timing level loads with a stopwatch, why on earth are they quoting 2 decimal places (and besides, the variability in reaction time is accounting for most of the supposed differences in any case). Half of their tests don't appear to tell anybody anything significant, and the most worthwhile page in there is the conclusion. Pretty graphics though.
Real-world use (Score:5, Interesting)
in front of thousands of people, where one mis-hap is already too much.
So far things have been flawless, and it has made a huge difference for me due to portability compared to anything else of the same capacity.
as previously this meant a two-drive combo with heftier power supply.
The weight and size make it easier to have it as a carry-on item, rather than in my checked luggage!
As far as performance, it has been able to handle 4 simultaneous 24-bit / 96 kHz audio tracks playing back with no hiccups whatsoever.
The drive-to-drive copying in Firewire 800 or SATA has been quite speedy and error-proof.... (copying 900 gig at a time is always a good test)
Dream come true if you ask me.... I still carry a backup anyway, LOL!
(ymmv(TM), batteries not included, kids don't try this at home, etc....)
Z.
Pretty small platters (Score:5, Interesting)
Seagate has announced (and released, I think?) their 1TB HDD with only 4 platters (cooler, quieter, less power, less weight, less cost to manufacture) that's 250gb a platter
Samsung have announced the F1 using 333GB per platter! 1.6TB if they copy Hitachi and slap 5 of them in a 3.5" unit - or rather 333gb single platter, light, cheap drives, be damned if anyone can find the F1 yet though
On another note... (Score:4, Insightful)
I doubt that anyone will remember this in a year. Quick; what was the model and manufacturer of the first drive to pass 500GB, or 1GB. Both were monumental engineering achievements in their time. These milestones will not be remembered because they are all evolutionary; a 10-30% jump in capacity. When we see 10x capacity increases in one generation, THAT name might be remembered.
That said.. good job Hitachi, but we all know that WD and Seagate will be out with their versions in a month or so.
Re:Data loss (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Data loss (Score:5, Informative)
Sales associate, I shit you not, said "The "P" is actually a newer product. It is 7 minor revisions later. We still carry the "i" because it's still very popular. The same thing happens with our wireless equipment, too. the "N" version is out, but most users are still buying the "G" Version"
I approached the guy after the sales associate left and said "listen, that guy has no clue what he's talking about. I is interlaced, P is progressive. On an "i" it's drawing 540 lines every frame, on a "p" it's drawing all 1080. Go with the "P" if you can afford the difference. It's worth it"
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Re:Data loss (Score:5, Insightful)
It's also the way to go for speed - your controller doesn't have to calculate the parity bits for every write operation (yes I know the parity sum is simple - that doesn't stop it from adding a bottleneck).
RAID5 is most useful where:
1. You desperately need the space.
AND
2. You can't afford the drives (or, for that matter, power/larger RAID controller) required to acheive the same space in RAID 1+0.
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Re:Data loss (Score:4, Informative)
Not all hardware controllers will allow you to do a reconstruct to add more
space and extend the partitions later on RAID 10 or 1+0.
Recovering from a failed 1+0 is ok if it is a "simple" failure.
I have had better luck recovering RAID5's than 10's or 1+0's.
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Re:Data loss (Score:4, Informative)
space and extend the partitions later on RAID 10 or 1+0.
OK, here's why we use RAID-10 at my installation: it provides great performance and can survive multiple drive failures without the overhead of something like RAID-6. RAID-10 also has no 'write-hole'. Don't just take my word for it, though, check out this article [adaptec.com] from Adaptec comparing the merits of all the basic RAID levels and their nested brethren.
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Re:Data loss (Score:5, Informative)
Anyway, what's that old saying? Expect the unexpected? When you buy a pile of drives, you are likely to get the batch from the same manufacturing line, day, etc. This probably also increases the chances of simultaneous failures if there is a physical quality problem. If you have two fail, expect a third. I generally don't mix up batches because I want to know where all the drives from a particular batch are, but maybe I should.
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Re:Data loss (Score:5, Informative)
In my experience, when S.M.A.R.T. tells you a drive is dead or dying, its not kidding.
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Re:Data loss (Score:4, Insightful)
While I agree that the S.M.A.R.T. heuristics might be a bit sensitive but if you consider what is at stake (yeah... your valuable pr0n collection), then I guess its better safe than sorry.
And, comparing it to the ink cartdriges? I am sure *your life* (or work...) does not depend on printing or not that pr0n picture...
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Re:Data loss (Score:4, Insightful)
I've always thought you have a slightly better chance of getting valid data off of a drive if you never actually power it down when it's failing. This is anecdotal from a power outage causing many old hard drives in a building to give up, with their computers normally having uptime measured in months or even years.
Of course, to recover data like this you would need another computer accessible via the network, rather than installing a replacement in the desktop itself. Read any possible data off it while you still can, without putting it through the stress of powerdown/powerup.
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Re:Data loss (Score:5, Informative)
Secondly, even if in theory you where rigth (which you aren't), in *practice* most data is not valuable enough that theres much real risk that anyone will recover it, even after something as simple as a one-time-all-nulls overwrite. (which is just about the suckiest overwrite you can do) Yes, in that case an expert lab *can* recover it, but odds are it won't happen.
In practice, if you do the standard wipe, which is usually some variant of all-nulls, all ones, 3 times random, there is -zip- chance that anyone will be able to get at the data that was once on the platter.
Now, what many (clueless people) do are "format" the drive or "delete" the files. These functions don't overwrite even once 99% of the platter, so files removed in this manner are certainly recoverable -- they're there in plaintext, just not referenced from the filesystem anymore. Something as simple as "cat
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Re:Data loss (Score:5, Insightful)
Even the NSA very very probably can not recover any useful information from a disk overwritten the way I wrote. They have lots of money and expertise, but the laws of physics apply to them too.
But they could get at the information on your computer by other means that you'd be unlikely to detect, if they really wanted to. For example, if the information is from the net and you don't encrypt everything, they could easily wiretap your broadband. Getting a hardware-keylogger into your keyboard would be possible too, aswell as dozens of other tricks.
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Re:Data loss (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Data loss (Score:4, Informative)
I've got the same question, as I've gone through a lot of hard drives over the years but only due to upgrading, not failure. The only exception was the IBM Deskstar GXP75 that had the whole click of death thing going on. I don't count that one since it was a known issue that resulted in a class action suit, which I didn't bother to take part in. The first one failed within a month, so I replaced it at the store, and the replacement failed after a day. Replaced again. The third one failed after a week but I was tired of going back to the store by then so tried an experiment - the click of death was kicking in somewhere near 500MB after the beginning of the drive so I repartitioned it to leave the first 500MB unpartitioned. My experience with the drive up to that point told me that wherever the click of death manifested, it would consistantly happen in whatever part of the drive it first happened at. That drive has been in constant use ever since then (it's been like 5 years or so by now hasn't it?) and still works great, since it never accesses the 'bad part' anymore.
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Re:5.25"? (Score:4, Insightful)
File next to the disk with multiple drive head assemblies; possible, but just not worth it when you could just fit more, smaller, cheaper, independent disks in the same space.
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