Attack of the Giants: 400GB Hard Drives Compared

Keefe writes "Recently, Hitachi and Seagate have come out with two of the biggest desktop hard drives available on the market at a massive 400GB each. These two drives carry almost identical specifications, with the exception of the Seagate Barracuda and its Native Command Queuing technology. Read the review at Techware Labs to see how these two drives compare head to head, with and without NCQ enabled, and in a RAID configuration."

Price

[turtled]

Now, when will the prices drop? Where is the cometition in the other companies to bring out more 400Giggers or more?

NCQ

[8086ed]

That's pretty dissapointing. Isn't NCQ supposed to be one of those "WICKED SPECTACULAR AWESOME GIMME YOUR MONEY YOU NEED IT" technologies? One of the reasons why I'm always 2 steps behind the technology curve, the other being the price.

Anandtech too

[slashuzer]

Anandtech [anandtech.com] too have reviewed the Segate drive. Read carefully because unfortunately enough platter density and NCQ haven't really made this drive as fast as one would imagine.

Hitachi and Seagate

[superpulpsicle]

When I think Hitachi, it brings up the Deskstar IDE line. Which was always the superior IDE choice, up until it launched the seriously flawed 75GB capacity drive.

When I think Seagate, it brings up top of the line SCSI.

Hitachi Deskstar 7K400 power management features

[the_ed_dawg]

One interesting thing about the Hitachi is that it has dynamic RPM (DRPM) scaling, so it will slow down to prevent overheating. This is useful because it prevents the drive from exceeding its thermal envelope. Other drives must stop processing when they reach their maximum rated temperature to prevent data corruption and mechanical failure. Granted, "stop processing" means several milliseconds of pause, but would you rather run really fast in bursts or just run continuously? Another neat feature is that DRPM will allow power management without completely shutting down the drive, providing good quality-of-service without wasting power. Considering that data centers spend a great deal of money on powering disk arrays and cooling them sufficiently, this could really take off in the server market. See Gurumurthi et al. [psu.edu] for details.

Quietness while under dynamic RPM

[UnapprovedThought]

DRPM sounds very nice, but is the drive's sound insulation (if any) tuned to cancel out the noise at varying speeds? It might be quiet at cruising speed but noisier at other speeds. That is, in the worst case, it might be great for the server room but not for a home DVR. Have you ever heard one?

Watch out for the noise

[spagetti_code]

I bought an external version of the Seagate 400G for my PVR, which sits in the lounge. The PVR is nicely silent and small, but the type of activity performed by this drive seems to make it noisy.

When recording a program, or playing a video from the drive, we see periodic bursts of writing - which I guess makes sense - loop: fill a buffer, empty it, goto loop.

The problem is that while the drive is pretty quiet, every write creates quiet a loud 'click', which is ( I assume) seek noise. So I get a noticabl

Eighth comment

[shreevatsa]

I am amazed that a Slashdot article has only seven comments as I write this, a week after the article was posted.
The typical /. article has several hundred comments, sometimes even thousands. Why is this poor article ignored? :)
Amazing.