Hitachi's 500GB SATA-II Reviewed

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."

Do the differences matter for "most people"

[Mochatsubo]

For %95 of the population, do the specs of the latest and greatest matter?

Yes, yes, I know we are the 5%.

-m

Now I can lose even more data...

[ReNeGaDe75]

when my Deskstar drive crashes after only a week of use.

Re:RPM ?

[nitehawk214]

RPM isnt the only factor. Remember that this 500GB drive has much higher data density on the platters. This means that it runs over more data in 1 revolution then a 100 GB drive.

Reliability?

[Ailure]

Isn't that one of the more important thing with HD's nowdays? Sure, speed is nice but it wouldn't matter much if the HD crashed after two years. Having a HD that is only three years old, but "already" started to report SMART warnings. It makes me wonder how reliable the HD's are of today. I heard alot of people having HD's crash on them, and most of the time it's HD's from the last three years. Have they become more unreliable? (And yes, i'm going to replace the HD on this computer soon. I start to notice a few oddities with it.) At least this HD have three years warrenty, which is nice. Then, my HD started to act funky just when the warrenty went out...

Re:LATENCY LATENCY LATENCY

[Anonymous Coward]

Buy a Western Digital Raptor SATA Drive. Under 5ms latency. Sure a 30g version costs as much as your average 200g SATA drive, but you really notice it when you run your OS of this drive.

Re:RPM ?

[Sparr0]

You obviously did not read the article, or even the summary, or you would have noticed that 7K500 is the model of hard drive. It is most likely 7200 RPM, not 7500 as you ignorantly replied against.

The reviews elsewhere

[jpc]

suggested that this drive get very hot indeed, as it is 4 platters not 3. Didnt really seem worthwhile to me, as heat is a major cause of HD failure.

Re:Hitatchi Deathstar

[Kjella]

Deathstar disks was a problematic series. It was the DeskStar 75GXP, the 75GB disks from IBM.

No, it wasn't just the 75GB disks, it was the entire series of disks using 15GB platters. They were notoriously unstable, one day you'd boot to the "click of death". If you look at the class action here [ibmdesksta...gation.com] IBM has agreed to settle. Make your claim by August 29, 2005. I lost a 45GB drive to this shit, but I'm not in the US so I don't qualify... I got mine replaced under my own country's consumer protection laws.

Kjella

Re:Hitach's?

[C64]

I'd trust "Hitach" before I'd trust Hitachi. I've been burned by Hitachi / IBM drives far too often to trust my data to the brand again.

Re:Do the differences matter for "most people"

[v1]

For those of us that run servers, rotation speed, seek time, transfer rate, these factors are really not that important. What counts in the trenches is how much space do you have, and how reliable is it?

Not everyone can afford a backup solution, some rely on raid protection, and others rely on a lucky rabbit's foot. Since I am in the 2nd category, (mirrors on anything that matters) I tend to actually look at cost per gb as the primary factor. If a drive fails, I send it in and get another one and resync the mirror. Every drive I buy has at least a 3 yr (if not 5) warranty. In the end, buying cheap drives is more cost effective than buying good drives, and is a lot more cost-effective than buying say a nice DLT drive and a pile of carts. (tho yes, mirror has pretty poor return on cost because of 50% usable space)

As long as I don't have to like swap out a drive more than once a year, I'm quite happy with reliability of even Maxtors. (though I still am not confident enough in my raids to install WD)

That being said, I wouldn't mind accquiring a pair of those 500's, though lately it's been getting a little tricky to find a FW bridge board that supports the really large drives. The last 300 pair I installed, (seagate even!) only one of the 14 bridge boards here would detect at 300. (instead of 128) Yes, they're all ATA6 and have up-to-date firmware, that doesn't seem to matter. WD uses their own "unique variation" on ATA6 for their big drives, so those are really fun to work with, I avoid them like plague.

Big, but noisy?

[hey]

I don't want the fastest or biggest disk.
Just the quietest.

Re:500GB finally?

[doormat]

Demand and the end of an underlying technology (GMR heads and parallel recording).

Not many consumers need 500GB of HD space in their computer for email and AOL. But 500GB would sure be useful in a Hi-Def PVR. But PVRs are still such a small segment compared to PCs.

Plus, tech wise, we're basically at the top of the S-Curve for the current HD technology. So we need to get the new technology and start the S-Curve all over again. We had a lot of advances when we went from 10GB HDs to 40 and 60GB HDs (one new larger capacity annoucement every quarter almost), but we've started to slow down and stagnate. I'm hoping things get going again soon and we make big advances from 1TB, 1.5TB. 2TB drives.

Personal Media Vaults

[Doc Ruby]

These big drives seem destined to be available only with fast IO interfaces. Makes sense when the data object is consumed at high-bandwidth, like HDVD video. Or when many concurrent streams are accessing the data, like a large scale (many users) Video On Demand app. The large storage capacity is reflected in the large transmission capacity: scaling up current data apps to more users or better resolution data.

But the biggest change we have right now is the ability of individuals to have lots of items of the same old size. People watching their own videos from their own libaries of hundreds of movies. Listening to their own songs from their own libraries of hundreds of thousands of songs. Those apps require huge storage, like hundreds or thousands of GB, for a single person. But they therefore don't require high bandwidth transmission. A 5400RPM EIDE drive is plenty fast enough, but it still needs 500GB capacity (which density might require the higher RPM, but not the faster interface, caches, etc). And for consumers, the overhead for IO bandwidth is a waste of money. As is more than maybe 2 or 3 drives for RAID failover, which also demands cheaper drives.

Hitachi's 0.5TB SATA-II drive is targeted at datacenters and multiuser servers, with money for bandwidth. So where are the cheap, huge, Personal Computer drives? Say, 500GB EIDE for $250?

Re:LATENCY LATENCY LATENCY

[Gldm]

Unless the drives support an asynchronous write system, which they do. NCQ will reorder the writes anyway. Latency is primarly a read-side issue, random writes are not as common as random reads.

You can always improve your seek time by adding more redundant mirrors. If we apply the formula the formula seen here [img113.echo.cx] where x is the number of redundant mirrors, we can calculate the value of p which will give us our rotational latency for the mean seek time (hence the 0.5 because we want the 50% point for seek times).

Using this you can get 7200rpm drives to easily outseek a 15000rpm drive by using 4 or more redundant sources, and it's still cheaper for the same capacity, AND more failure tolerant.

This is why RAID always wins. Quantity has a quality all its own. SCSI used RAID to defeat the SLED concept in mainfraimes, commodity drives are doing the same to SCSI, by playing with the same rules.

Who Cares?

[mlylecarlin]

As nice as that is, it's still a Deskstar.

How cool are you going to feel when your 500 GB drive dies?

Re:Do the differences matter for "most people"

[v1]

RAID has saved my bacon on several occasions actually. I would much rather have a drive smoke and swap it out and remirror and be done with it than to have to restore from backup. Even a good backup setup can have issues with restoring, and you always lose data between backup and failure. With mirrors, that doesn't happen. If you have a good raid controller, it'll remirror while online, and you don't even chalk up any downtime.

Now mirror doesn't protect from software/hardware controller malfunction, nor does it protect you from yourself in the case you delete something you needed, but the setup here prevents accidental deletion for the most part, and mirroring guards against drive failure which does happen from time to time, so it's doing its job, and isn't doing anything extra I don't need.

You have to pick the appropriate level of paranoia for what you're doing. To say your backup method is best for everyone is wrong no matter what you say.