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Terabyte Hard Drive Put To the Test
Posted by
Zonk
on Mon Aug 13, 2007 04:15 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."
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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.
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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)
Re:Test? (Score:5, Funny)
kanashhk shhk shhk (Score:5, Funny)
I love the sound of head crashes in the morning. Smells like... a coffee break.
RAID 5 Please (Score:5, Funny)
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 ?
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)
Re: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)
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]
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.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.
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)
-
A 100 Mbit/s ethernet card is 100 * 10^6 bit/s (power of 10)
-
A 480 Mbit/s USB2 link is 480 * 10^6 bit/s (power of 10)
-
A 500 GByte disk is 500 * 10^9 bytes (power of 10)
-
A 56 kbaud modem is 56 * 10^3 baud/s (power of 10)
-
A 1.5 GHz processor is 1.5 * 10^9 Hz (power of 10)
-
A 6 Mbit/s DSL line is 6 * 10^6 bit/s (power of 10)
-
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
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.Conclusion in the article: (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Data loss (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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.
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
Re:Data loss (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Fills up too fast anyways (Score:5, Funny)
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.