Hitachi's 500GB SATA-II Reviewed 309
Doggie Fizzle writes "The specifications for the Hitachi Desktstar 7K500 are impressive. 500 GB of disk space, 16 MB of cache memory, and 3.0 Gbps of transfer speeds are about as good as you are going to get in today's hard drives. The only category that might be rivaled is transfer speed, but that would require RAID or an Ultra320 SCSI drive to do so. This BigBruin review matches it up with some Seagate drives to show off its performance."
It's not SATA II (Score:5, Informative)
It's instead, SATA 3Gb/s. Most motherboard manufacturers jumped the gun however and invented their version.
Matt
Re:3 gbps? (Score:3, Informative)
Deathstar and IBM customer satisfaction (Score:4, Informative)
Anyway, if IBM thinks that's acceptable, I won't ever be buying one of its disks.
Re:3 gbps? (Score:1, Informative)
*Most* super fast 7.5k RPM disks can do about 50 megabytes or 420 megabit per second max.
I have two 75gb 10,000 Raptor SATA drives that together raid-0 get about 110megabytes/s.. but those are 10k RPM disks (spare me the lecture about drive density = higher speed, I know this). Thats about 1 gb/s.. but no where near 3gb per second and this is using 2 raid-0 disks.
Slashdot editors need get a clue.
Re:3 gbps? 3 gbps? Is that 375 MB/s? IDE/SATA does (Score:5, Informative)
SATA-II indeed supports that. So does the disk. From cache.. No way it reaches more than 50MiB/sec from the platters, which is what counts. So I think it should be dead easy to rival speed with raid. My 6 year old IBM 18.2GB UltraStar drives read 25MiB/sec, so 3 of them would outperform in read/write. But would not take that much data...
So, indeed, it is a large disk, but it is not extraordinarily fast. Of course, bigger disks means more data per second, since the platter size is the same. Then data has to be packed more densily, and more data passes under head per second. So the disk can read more, in a sequential read.
Caveat Emptor! loud screeching noises (Score:4, Informative)
Little did I know when I bought it that every 15 minutes it would make a loud screeching noise as it performs a self-check.
There's no way to turn this off and it's über annoying. It's a lovely drive in all other respects, but I won't buy another unless I know for a *fact* it doesn't behave in this way.
--
Toby
Re:It's not SATA II (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Hitatchi Deathstar (Score:5, Informative)
Deathstar disks was a problematic series. It was the DeskStar 75GXP, the 75GB disks from IBM. They was using 5 platters, instead of the normal 4, in the same height. This meant denser packed plates, which ment less space for heads. This crashed. But other disks from IBM was entirely fine.
Here [ufl.edu] is a page with more info on the DeathStars. And Yes, I've been using many IBM/Hitachi disks, and never had problems with the 4-platter versions. It was just that 5 platters was kinda exprimental...
Re:Caveat Emptor! loud screeching noises (Score:3, Informative)
smartctl --offlineauto=off
Re:RPM ? (Score:3, Informative)
$175 for a 75 GB SATA Raptor
$400 for a 7K500
$600 for a 300GB 10K Seagate SCSI
The 7200RPM drives are a much better balance for speed, capacity and cost. Part of the reason 10k drives are lower capacity is that the platters need to be smaller diameter, which is also part of the reason why the seek time rating is lower, because the average distance the head travels is smaller.
Those using the drives just to store and play downloaded files probably could get away with even slower RPMs to save on money, heat and maybe less noise.
Re:RPM ? (Score:1, Informative)
How on earth can writing the model number of the hard drive be considered 'annoying'?
another (shorter) review of the same drive (Score:1, Informative)
Price per GB... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:LATENCY LATENCY LATENCY (Score:3, Informative)
Unless, of course, you ever write data. If you do, then the heads on both disks will be in the same place and so take the same amount of time to seek.
deathstars (Score:5, Informative)
We might have one deathstar in the building that still works, and if I find it I'm replacing it. Save yourself the headache, do not buy deathstars. When maxtor bought quantum, maxtor adopted quantum's designs, and now produces decent drives. Hitachi bought IBM's drive line, but they just inherited the crappy deathstar design and that's what they're selling.
The only model of drive I have seen perform as bad as a deathstar is the old Quantum Fireball 6.4gb's, which tended to smoke their spindle motor controller IC. At least those you could swap controller cards and save your data.
Re:It's not SATA II (Score:2, Informative)
Re:3 gbps? 3 gbps? Is that 375 MB/s? IDE/SATA does (Score:3, Informative)
I believe that while the system's cache excels at saving disk reads (in fact it's faster and more effective than the disk controller's cache ever could be) the disk controller's cache can offer significant acceleration for disk writes. The system's cache can only postpone writes, not accelerate them. With a controller cache, data may be dumped to the disk controller at the full bus speed, rather than being limited by the speed of the spinning metal.
I think you'll find that when comparing drives with identical specs apart from the controller cache (Western Digital, for example, has offered "Standard" 2MB cache and "Special Edition" 8MB cache versions of otherwise identical units for some years), the drive with the larger cache does indeed get better benchmark scores.
And 8MB or even 16MB of RAM for the disk controller is very cheap these days. Skimping on that cache wouldn't save enough money to make a significant upgrade to the system RAM.
Recent Hitachi experience... (Score:5, Informative)
I attempted to return a failed IBM Deskstar last year only to be told I would have to return it to the US, not the Canadian centre I had used in the past.
I explained repeatedly that I had always returned HDs of all makes to Canadian centres and that it was prohibitively expensive to ship a DEAD HD to the US.
Hitachi didn't care. I have never bought a Hitachi drive since and never will.
I have been using Seagate HDs because of their 5 year warranty and have not had a single failure to date. Seagate = cool, quiet and reliable.
Goodbye IBM/Hitachi, Hello Seagate.
Brian
Re:3 gbps? 3 gbps? Is that 375 MB/s? IDE/SATA does (Score:4, Informative)
From the spec sheet:
Sustained data rate (MB/sec) 64.8 - 31 (zone 0 - 29)
Re:Why don't you explain what you mean... (Score:3, Informative)
It's the same with RAM, networks, Drives.. you ask for data, and there is a slight delay while the system gets itself set to give that data to you. Usually, once you've started retrieving that data, the rest comes really quickly as its cached, or otherwise stored sequentially.
ie. Imagine a drive with a file stored bit-by-bit in sequence. You ask for the file, once the heads have moved to the right point, the drive will read all the bits and return them to you. Latency is that initial delay.
Now, imagine you're asking for 10 files, each a tenth of the size of the original.. you won't be able to retrieve them all in the same amount of time. So a drive with higher latency will take correspondingly longer to get you those files than one with lower latency.
This is also why CAS latency is important in RAM, and why gamers will spend loads extra on CL2 modules. Also why getting 1 large amount of network data is very mich faster than getting it in smaller chunks.
Yes, but... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Hitatchi Deathstar (Score:5, Informative)
Closer, but it's even more detailed than that. It was the entire series of platters produced at one particular fabrication plant. Which is why you get such varied reports about them - the same drives were made at (at least) two plants, and only one of them was broken (the cause was a bad retooling when they started that line of disks, or something like that).
Re:RPM ? (Score:3, Informative)
Anyhow, in RAID 0 configuration, they are pretty snappy. I've got a pair of Rapors as my main OS/Program drive, and had these as my data/work drive. The heat difference is noticeable between the Raptors and the Deskstars. A bit of a performance difference (I do a lot of VMWare image work which hits the IO hard) but not enough to justify spending my personal cash to go 10K drives after seeing what these 'value' drives can do.
Re:Wooo (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Queuing (Score:4, Informative)
Google NCQ for more info than you need
Re:Pros and cons (Score:1, Informative)