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."

3 gbps?

[Bill Wong]

3 gbps? Is that 375 MB/s? IDE/SATA doesn't support that! What's the point?

Deskstar?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone know what the reliability on this line of drives is? After my experiences with the IBM line, I'm hesitant to buy anything with Deskstar on it. Just recently I replaced my ATA Deathstar (AGAIN!) and Hitachi sent me what looks to be a rebranded IBM. Same model, could be the same drive for all I know.

I'm guessing the newer Hitachi line of SATA drives no longer carries the IBM Deathstar plague, but I'd like some assurance before plunking down cash on it. In the meantime, I'll tolerate the performance losses of a Seagate if it means there's a better chance of keeping my data.

LATENCY LATENCY LATENCY

[latencylatencylatenc]

LATENCTY LATENCY LATENCY LATENCY LATENCTY LATENCY LATENCY.

LATENCY is what is causing the slow performance of hard drives, who cares what the MB/s is (its good enough) its the latency that kills you more than anything RAID will not increase LATENCY. RAID can only make things more complex and make it worse (no system can be 100% efficient). RAID can increase MB/s but as I've allready said that isn't a big deal. What we need is lower latency Hard drives. We have enough storage. I don't need 500GB I want good latency.

Queuing

[confusion]

At one point, the IBM/Hitachi ATA drives had command tag queuing that allowed for performance that was more in-line with SCSI. The link is /.ed - does this line of drives bring the command queuing back? I've been looking for some new drives for servers, and these sound mighty nice, even if they are "deathstar's".

Jerry
http://www.cyvin.org/ [cyvin.org]

500GB finally?

[toddestan]

Is it me, or have advancements in harddrives been slowing down? 400GB has been king for a over a year, and only two manufacturers seem to even have a 400GB offering. Just a few years ago, it seemed that everytime I turned around bigger drives were coming out. Have we finally hit some kind of limit for magnetic storage?

Half a year later, now seen at Slashdot

[msbsod]

http://www.electronicsweekly.com/ [electronicsweekly.com] (UK) reported about this disk half a year ago! http://www.electronicsweekly.com/articles/article. asp?liArticleID=38427 [electronicsweekly.com]

Re:What are the legal use ?

[springbox]

It would be good for capturing video in real time. Ever tried to dump an uncompressed video stream before? (MPEG-4 software compressors are way too slow for realtime.) A few minutes will eat up a few GB of space. I think you can see where I'm going with this.

Re:Deskstar?

[Jrono]

I have a Hitachi Deskstar 250GB SATA drive that recently died. Its death was similar to the many IBM Deskstars I have had. Fortunately, for Hitachi, it is outside of its one year warranty. Well, fortunately for me too, because now I won't have to worry about random loss of data as much due to using a replacement drive... After many dead IBM Deskstars, and this Hitachi, I will never touch an IBM/Hitachi drive again.
At the moment, I am going with Seagate. 5 year warranties. I don't have enough personal experience with them yet to know how reliable they really are though.

TV Library.

[Cyno01]

Compression free video? I rip or download files for all the TV DVDs i've got, and more. Average 1hr show is around 350MB in a DivX or Xvid .avi. Seems like a lot of space, but its really only about a fifth of the space of whats on the DVD. Compression is good these days, but its still not as crisp as off the discs themselves. Sure having the DVDs is nice, but you've still gotta pick one, take it off the shelf, put it in the player, switch your AV stuff to it. Whole lot easier to treat the DVDs as a backup to sit on a shelf for display, or even in a box, and then just being able to call up anything in seconds off the HD. Its nice to hit a button and have my playlist of a couple dozen series come up on shuffle. Its like adult swim, sci-fi channel and TNT daytime all rolled into one whenever i want. I have 2 250GB SATA drives in RAID0, and infact ordered another 100GB drive the other day to move my music onto (65 or so gigs of legally ripped CDs, 300+ CDs @256kb MP3). If i had the money, would i like 2 of these? Hell yes, double my storage without taking up any more room in my already full case. I will admit that all my stuff isn't 100% legal, but thats more out of practicality, simpsons DVDs are only up to season 5... and fair use vs DMCA with the issue of me being too lazy to rip stuff myself...

Re:Do the differences matter for "most people"

[Gr8Apes]

For the paranoid, use a mirrored set with an extra drive and swap out once a week.

What you're really getting with a mirrored set the way you're using it is uptime, not backups. Backups would require the swap out with a total of 3 drives in the series, at a minimum.

I run RAID 5 (yes, SCSI) and it's awesome in cases of a drive failure (2 in last 5 years) but it certainly doesn't make me feel safe, since I did lose an entire drive set once to a virus (fortunately, it was an old machine I was testing something with and whoopsie - connected it on the wrong side of the firewall. Yes, it was a fresh NT install...:)

Audio production

[Sycraft-fu]

When you do 5.1 production, espically for DVD-A, it gets real large real fast. The final product is about 100MB/minute. The tracks to produce it can easily go over 1GB/minute.

I have a folder on my disk where I'm just playing around, not even doing any serious production, with a couple of 5.1 mixes in different formats. It's 6GB.

I'm sure HD video production is even worse, but I don't do that.