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Data Storage

Half-Terabyte Hard Drive Reviewed 481

Posted by CmdrTaco from the thats-almost-big-enough dept.
EconolineCrush writes "The Tech Report has posted an in-depth review of Hitachi's half-terabyte Deskstar 7K500, the largest hard drive available on the market. The drive is compared with five of the latest drives from Maxtor, Seagate, and Western Digital, so the review serves as a good round-up of the fastest Serial ATA drives on the market. Performance testing is quite extensive, covering desktop applications, load times, file copy tests, multi-user workloads, disk-intensive multitasking, and even noise levels and power consumption."
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Half-Terabyte Hard Drive Reviewed More

Half-Terabyte Hard Drive Reviewed

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  • full article mirror & comment (Score:4, Informative)

    by winkydink ( 650484 ) * <sv.dude@gmail.com> on Thursday September 08, 2005 @01:08PM (#13511252) Homepage Journal
    here [networkmirror.com]

    How does Joe Sixpack back up 500Gb? That's an awful lot of digital pics & videos.

  • Just so you know (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Seth Finklestein ( 582901 ) on Thursday September 08, 2005 @01:08PM (#13511254) Journal
    I don't think any of you know this, but this is the same Deskstar line that IBM sold to try and save face. I personally lost seven hard drives due to the poor manufacturing quality. Those hard drives contained data that was invaluable to me.

    I strongly urge all of Slashdot to boycott Hitachi and its so-called "DeathStar" drives.

    • Disk drive brand voodoo (Score:5, Insightful)

      by winkydink ( 650484 ) * <sv.dude@gmail.com> on Thursday September 08, 2005 @01:12PM (#13511317) Homepage Journal
      Everybody has their own horro story and their own brand of drives that they postively hate. I know people that will nver buy a Seagate drive and swear buy IBM, and son, and so on and so on for every single drive mfg out there. Every mfg has had a large bad run of drives in their history. What do you propose people do, use plastic? NVRAM? floppies?

      • Re:Disk drive brand voodoo (Score:4, Insightful)

        by MightyMartian ( 840721 ) on Thursday September 08, 2005 @01:16PM (#13511372) Journal
        Well, for the commercial systems, clearly RAID and frequent backups are the answer, and that's what we've done where I work. We have ever expectation that the drives we buy are just pure crap that aren't likely to survive a year.

        For the home user it's a little different. They're not likely to have RAID, nor are they likely to have backup systems of any real ability. For them, it means that the shitty hard drives being pushed out by manufacturers who have become addicted to storage capacity at the expense of actual quality of manufacture are going to spell a disaster every couple of years. It means the expense of someone retrieving (if possible) important information and the expense of replacing the drive itself with another crappy drive. It looks like the computer world has turned into the same kind of business as the automotive world; manufactured obselesence.

      • Since the Deathstar fiasco I know no one who swears by IBM disks. OTOH, I agree that people are influenced by the failures of the drives that they have owned. The only manufacturer I haven't had multiple drive failures with is Maxtor. I have had batches of the same models of Seagates, IBMs, and Western Digitals fail.

    • Re:Just so you know (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 08, 2005 @01:36PM (#13511617)
      I personally lost seven hard drives due to the poor manufacturing quality. Those hard drives contained data that was invaluable to me.

      Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me seven times?
    • Yeah, a company I worked at when I first moved to California had MANY problems with the 'deathstar' drives. We replaced many of them, RMA's a few, got refunds for others, what a hassle! I think we switched to Western Digital drives after that, other than some SCSI Seagate drives for a RAID-based database server.
    • I had two of them; after taking the second one to the store, the guy there told me that he didn't even need to test if it was really broken; he already knew, because it was the tenth he got back on that day. Those things were just totally broken.

    • Re:Just so you know (Score:5, Informative)

      by freidog ( 706941 ) on Thursday September 08, 2005 @01:54PM (#13511834)
      While Hitachi did by IBM's HDD wing, we need to be clear.
      The actual "DeathStar" drives were a very select line. IBM tried to put 5 platters into their high capacity 75GXP line, the norm is 4 for 3.5'' disks.
      These lead to excessive head crashed (I've heard up to around 30% of the drives met their death this way).

      Even before IBM sold the HDD buisness they had gone back to a 4 platter design which effectivley elminated the 'death' part of the deathstar line.

      If you like to boycott them based on passed wrongs, that's fine and your call. (Ther are brands I avoid to this day because of past buiness practices). But there are no quality / reliability issues with any of the current Hitachi hard drives.

  • Size soon not being an issue (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Pyrowolf ( 877012 ) on Thursday September 08, 2005 @01:08PM (#13511260) Homepage
    We're getting to a point in storage mediums where size is outgrowing necessity, at least in the consumer aspect. Geeks aside, what everyday user needs a half-terabyte of space?
    • Photographers who shoot and scan medium and large format (~600MB/image for medium format, ~3GB for 4x5) , Home Video Enthusiasts.
    • For me it would be music, movies, and photoshop layered graphics at high resolutions.
    • Speak for yourself. Porn collections can be pretty demanding.

    • How could anyone ever use 500 GB?!?!?! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by merreborn ( 853723 ) on Thursday September 08, 2005 @01:34PM (#13511593) Journal
      I thought I'd never fill my new 200 GB drive. When I installed it, my use patterns changed -- I started saving images of all the CDs I frequently used, and hanging on to p2p-acquired files I wouldn't normally. I kept MP3s and (cough) videos around I normally wouldn't have, and started downloading GB after GB every night.

      I had the drive filled in less than a couple of months.

      Also, back when we had 250 MB drives, almost all audio was distibuted as 8khz .wavs, averaging a few hundred KB each.

      When we moved to 2 GB drives, audio was distributed in 128kbps MP3s, averaging around a few MB each -- ten times the drive space, ten times file size.

      With drives in the hundreds of GB, it becomes feasible to store lossless audio -- somewhere on the order of 30 MB/song.

      All in all: as drive space goes up, filesizes, and image/audio/video quality go up. And user behaviors change. As my father used to say: The steady state of disks is full" --- which, as I just learned, he ripped off from Dennis Ritchie, co-author of the definitive book on "C".
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • How many floppies do I need to back this beast up? (Score:4, Funny)

    by RoterheadPro ( 909161 ) on Thursday September 08, 2005 @01:08PM (#13511265)
    I don't think my four banger calculator goes that high?

  • Quality (Score:5, Informative)

    by MightyMartian ( 840721 ) on Thursday September 08, 2005 @01:09PM (#13511271) Journal
    And what's the quality of these drives. We're pretty much at the point now a days that we consider hard drives to be expendable. I usually have to replace a hard drive every five to six months, and often these are still under warranty. It seems the quality of manufacture is just the pits.

    • Re:Quality (Score:5, Insightful)

      by mcrbids ( 148650 ) on Thursday September 08, 2005 @01:14PM (#13511344) Journal
      I usually have to replace a hard drive every five to six months, and often these are still under warranty.

      Man, where are you BUYING your drives? The back of a truck? I've had ONE hard disk failure in a few YEARS, despite working with several dozen of them. (knock on wood) I purchase at LEAST 1 per month, and just don't have trouble. (Though, when it matters, I buy two identical drives and configure with RAID1)

      Or, are you just whining in order to whore for karma?

      • Re:Quality (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Linker3000 ( 626634 ) on Thursday September 08, 2005 @02:47PM (#13512333) Journal
        I buy two very similar capacity units from two different manufacturers (ie: Seagate + Western Digital) so I don't get caught out by a manufacturing defect - that happened many years ago to a company for which I was doing some freelance work - two hard disks in their server's RAID 5 array had drive motor bearing failures within about 15 minutes of each other!
    • I've never had a PC harddrive fail during normal useful lifetimes with them, and most of them over the last fifteen years have been used 24/7. That goes from MRM, to RLL, to ESDI, SCSI, and IDE drives for desktop and laptops. Probably, if I had to guess, 20-30 drives total over that period of time. When I've upgraded to a bigger drive usually after four or five years, it goes on a shelf, and on the few occasions I had to go back to them, still worked.

      And I'm not someone who buys new hardware very often. My

    • Re:Quality (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Moby Cock ( 771358 )
      I think you need to re-examine your use of hard drives. I've never replaced one, ever. And I run my machine pretty hard. What on earth are you doing to cause total failure twice a year?

      On the topic of the original post. 500GB is a lot of storage, semingly enough for the forseeable future of home users wanting space for digital pictures and songs. However, it may soon come to pass that DVDs are forsaken in lieu of downloaded versions of movies. There may come a day, say in five or six years, that /
    • I usually have to replace a hard drive every five to six months, and often these are still under warranty.

      I had a Maxtor I had to RMA 3 times over the course of two years. Each time they sent back a bigger drive, the most recent of which has run fine for over 5 years. The original was installed along side a WD that has run without problems the whole time.

      Some drives just don't last as long as others. It's probably on a per-drive basis, rather than a per model/mfg. basis.
    • I've had some drives die on me over the past few years. It's generally quick and unexpected, but sometimes you know they'll fail soon when you hear the terrible whine.

      But I've got a lot of drives. In my machines at home all total, I have about 22 hard disks spinning. They've all been running for at least 6 months now, but most of them have been spinning for over three years. No issues.

      If you got them running really hot, they could die faster. But it's often just luck of the draw. I had an IDE disk in

    • Re:Quality (Score:3, Informative)

      by ScrewMaster ( 602015 )
      Well, they've always been expendable, that's why we feel the need to back them up. But how long a drive lasts in service depends upon how you use it. My server, for example, has four WD drives in a dual-mirror configuration with power-saving turned OFF (so the drives don't get constantly spun up and down) and the system has been running for several years without a single failure. The server itself is never powered down. The other big secret is ventilation. ALL my systems have drives in removable bays with f

    • Check your power quality (Score:5, Informative)

      by bigtallmofo ( 695287 ) on Thursday September 08, 2005 @01:43PM (#13511691)
      I usually have to replace a hard drive every five to six months

      The culprit might not be shoddy manufacturing but rather power problems within your house. I am not an electrician but when I had one at my house recently he told me my line voltage was 105 volts. In my area, it's supposed to be 120 volts. In researching it, I discovered that most power companies guarantee 113 to 127 volts of power. Going outside of this range leads to premature failure of components and appliances, especially ones that have motors in them (like hard drives).

      Again, I'm not an electrician and I'm sure someone will find something to correct me on but I was informed that when your voltage is too low, things like motors draw more current to compensate which makes them fail sooner.

      It's worth checking with a $19 voltage meter, anyway, especially considering the fix is a free phone call to your power company for a free fix.
    • Your case may be too hot. Heat kills hard drives.

      JOhn

  • Deathstars (Score:3, Funny)

    by GoatMonkey2112 ( 875417 ) on Thursday September 08, 2005 @01:10PM (#13511277)
    Please tell me that these are not built on the same technology as the old IBM Deathstars.

  • Nifty? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ResQuad ( 243184 ) * <(moc.ketelosnok) (ta) (todhsals)> on Thursday September 08, 2005 @01:11PM (#13511295) Homepage
    Yes - Its great to see a drive thats not actually half a terrabyte (because 1024/2 = 512 != 500) but getting close to such a mark. My question is - does it really have to be such and uber preforming drive?

    In my data server I have one good, fast drive (or some times two in a raid 1) running the OS and all regularly access files. Then I stick the big slow drives in for storing files for long term. Maybe thats just because I dont activly need 500gigs of data - but I'd rather see tests about how well it stands up to stress, heat, and etc - indicators on how long the drive will last.

    • Re:Nifty? (Score:3, Informative)

      by John_Sauter ( 595980 )
      Its great to see a drive thats not actually half a terrabyte (because 1024/2 = 512 != 500)....
      Actually, if the photograph in the article is accurate, it is just over half a terrabyte. The label on the drive claims it has 976,733,168 blocks. At 512 bytes per block that's 500,087,382,016 bytes.
              John Sauter (J_Sauter@Empire.Net)

  • crashes firefox (Score:3, Informative)

    by crabpeople ( 720852 ) on Thursday September 08, 2005 @01:13PM (#13511323) Journal
    anyone elses firefox on windows crash on that article? i was clicking next and the 3rd page crashed my browser!

    now all the pages do it!

    someone doesnt want me to get 500gb drives

    someone, from the govt...

  • Jumping to conclusions... (Score:4, Informative)

    by op12 ( 830015 ) on Thursday September 08, 2005 @01:15PM (#13511352) Homepage
    To make a long article short (sort of):

    Conclusions

    As the only 500GB hard drive currently available on the market, the Deskstar 7K500 is really without peers. Its closest competition is 100GB behind, and some manufacturers are stuck with drives in the 300GB range. Exclusivity carries a price, though. With a $320 street price, the 7K500 has a higher cost per GB than lower capacity drives. However, the 7K500's higher density can be worth the premium for systems where storage capacity is limited by available internal drive bays, Serial ATA ports, or both. Those seeking quieter systems should also prefer higher density drives, since the additive properties of noise levels make packing a system with multiple drives less desirable.

    And remember, the Deskstar 7K500 is more than just 500GB of storage capacity. It also has everything one should expect from a high-end drive, including support for 300MB/s Serial ATA transfer rates and Native Command Queuing, a hefty 16MB cache, and a three-year warranty. None of those features go above and beyond the call of duty, but they don't disappoint, either. Neither does the 7K500's performance, for the most part. The Deskstar scores well in desktop application benchmarks and file copy tests, but slow boot times and a poor showing in three of four IOMeter test patterns make it difficult to recommend the drive across the board.

    Poor performance with IOMeter's file server, workstation, and database access patterns suggests that the Deskstar is inappropriate for multi-user environments with heavy read and write demands. However, the drive's surprisingly strong showing in the read-dominated web server test pattern shows that the 7K500 can most certainly keep up in select server environments. And there's no doubt that the 7K500 can keep up on the desktop, at least once you get the system booted. That makes it easy to recommend the Deskstar to storage-hungry desktop and home theater PC users looking to add capacity one half-terabyte at a time.
    • As the only 500GB hard drive currently available on the market, the Deskstar 7K500 is really without peers.

      And yet I have a 500 GB drive sitting on my desk at home right this very minute and that is NOT the Deskstar 7K500. How is that possible?

  • Where do I need to store1/2 a terabyte of data... (Score:4, Informative)

    by Gopal.V ( 532678 ) on Thursday September 08, 2005 @01:20PM (#13511432) Homepage Journal
    Let me take a wild guess - in my mysql database ?.
    Poor performance with IOMeter's file server, workstation, and database access patterns suggests that the Deskstar is inappropriate for multi-user environments with heavy read and write demands.
    Which excludes this as a DB backing store or CVS server ?.

    I don't need a 500 GB disk for serving static webpages, which are best done with enough RAM to push them all or something like akamai. It's noisy while it's idle and draws power like a hungry hog. I expect that it needs a decent bit of cooling too.

    Lastly this is a 7,2000 RPM disk that costs 320 odd dollars. What do you think ?.
  • This drive is finally more powerful than my brain which can store exactly 487 GB of information per lifetime. Wait, did I already post this message??

  • Filesystem on a large drive (Score:3, Insightful)

    by FlynnMP3 ( 33498 ) on Thursday September 08, 2005 @01:26PM (#13511494)
    It's great to have that amount of space, but the filesystem determines how well that space is used. I have a Lacie external 500 gig HD and I formatted it with NTFS - Windows XP preferred filesystem. Beyond the formatted space available only being about 460 gig (drive specs versus computer specs) the cluster size is big enough that is doesn't make sense to store small (128K) files on it. I know it is the fault of the filesystem on the OS, but a lot of people have XP and 2K. Earlier versions of Windows won't work on the entire 500 gig HD. It'll have to be split up into multiple partitions.

    My point is until there is a filesystem that has a smaller cluster size (or is database like) these HUGE drives are best used for very large files. The more smaller files that are put on there, the drive fills up much quicker than you'd imagine.

    -FlynnMP3
    • you can set the cluster size manually to anything between 512bytes to 4096+ bytes when you format.

      but 4k is the default size for whatever reason.

      i think someone who talks about databases and servers so authoratitively ought to know something about setting cluster sizes.

      and in the example you gave above, 128k (spelling error?) you wouldn't waste any space at all since 128 is evenly divisible by 4.

      and the drive specs as you put it, are a fraudulent practice endulged in by drive manufacturers. they know that j

  • Oh is it? (Score:2, Informative)

    by stlhawkeye ( 868951 )
    "Hitachi's half-terabyte Deskstar 7K500, the largest hard drive available on the market.

    1 TB [lacie.com]

    2 TB [lacie.com]

    And far superior quality. WHAT YOU SAY? They're not "on the market" yet? Yeah, that's true.

    This one is 800 GB, and it's available. [lacie.com]

    WHAT YOU SAY? It's not a "hard drive" but an ethernet disk?

    Oh. Well you got me there.

  • Cost per gigabyte is too high (Score:3, Informative)

    by 55555 Manbabies! ( 861806 ) on Thursday September 08, 2005 @01:41PM (#13511665)
    Hitach 7K500 - $357 [newegg.com] - .71 cents per gigabyte
    Western Digital WD2500KS (250 GB, comparable specs) - $122 [newegg.com] - .49 cents per gigabyte

  • cue the standard HD review flames (Score:5, Funny)

    by Gothmolly ( 148874 ) on Thursday September 08, 2005 @01:41PM (#13511669)
    SCSI is better, all your (S|P)ATA users are losers.
    Who can back up all that data?
    Pr0n!
    s/Deskstar/Deathstar
    (Seagate|Maxtor|IBM|Hitachi|LaCie) is better!
    It runs too hot
    It runs too loud
    I have {insert obscure Linux kernel bug} when I install $DISTRO to this drive
    How many Libraries of Congress per hogshead is that?

    Seriously, does anything have anything TRULY insightful to say? (this post doesn't count, since its a meta-post)
  • Yesterday I read something about TWO TB, IN A LAPTOP! Ha!

    (for those failing to detect the humor, I know yesterdays' article was a hoax.)

  • only a month's worth of p0rn (Score:3, Funny)

    by peter303 ( 12292 ) on Thursday September 08, 2005 @02:02PM (#13511936)
    It only holds 500 hours of video. If I watched every minute from waking to sleeping, I use that up in a month :-(

  • I didn't see the joke, so i'll post it... (Score:4, Funny)

    by MxTxL ( 307166 ) on Thursday September 08, 2005 @02:02PM (#13511941)
    So thats what they use in the 6.8GHz 1TB RAM and 2TB HDD Laptop!!

  • Performance, what about noise and power? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by daBass ( 56811 ) on Thursday September 08, 2005 @02:34PM (#13512207)
    What is the obsession with speed for a drive that will really only be used for storage of low-bitrate media, like HDTV. (yes, that is very low bitrate compared to what these drives can deliver)

    I would really like a drive like this that runs at 5400 or even 4200 RPM and makes less noise, consumes less power and won't wear out very quick. They will still read and write at much higher rates than you really need, except for that one time you copy a movie from one server to another over GB ethernet.

    Please Maxtor, WD et. al, save the world and slow down.

  • Cost Per Gigabyte - why is it going up? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by falser ( 11170 ) on Thursday September 08, 2005 @02:42PM (#13512284) Homepage
    I remember back in the 2GB to 20GB era a larger harddrive always had a lower cost per GigaByte. A 10GB drive might cost $200, but a 20GB drive would cost $350. In recent years this trend has reversed - anyone know why? Are they not just adding platters anymore? It is just mark-up for mark-ups sake?

  • Lots of Space (Score:4, Insightful)

    by JohnnySlash ( 913420 ) on Thursday September 08, 2005 @02:56PM (#13512413)
    Having read the previous posts about the LaCie drives (multiple drives, one enclosure), I wanted to start a different thread regarding large amounts of drive space: I am a professional video editor, so I drink up drive space like water. Last summer, we were faced with a documentary project that referenced 450 hour long tapes. We turned to a G5 running FinalCut on 8GB ram, and, in the end, 6 of the LaCie Big Disk Extremes (500GB). We armed the G5 with a pair of Firewire 800 cards with three ports a piece, giving each drive it's own connection. Though we were forced to do pretty regular system maintenance (repair permissions, trash caches), the system ran REALLY well. i would do it again with some sort of redundancy (without it - scary, huh?), but we were somewhat limited for time to plan this system. Depending on your job/lifestyle, even 3TB can be too small these days...

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