The First Terabyte Hard Drive Reviewed 495
mikemuch writes "ExtremeTech has a review and benchmarks of the Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 1TB Hard Drive, which ushers in the terabyte age. It performs well on HDTach and PCMark benchmarks, though not as speedily as professional-grade drives. It could be just the ticket for digital media junkies. 'One of the first issues to note is that you may not see an actual one terabyte capacity on your system. First, the formatted capacity is always less than the raw space available on the drive. Directory information and formatting data always take up some space. Second, the hard drive industry's definition of a megabyte differs from the rest of the PC business. One megabyte of hard drive space is 1,000,000 bytes: 10^6 bytes. Operating systems calculate one megabyte as 2^20 bytes, or 1,048,576 bytes. Once installed and set up, Hitachi's 1TB hard drive offers up an actual formatted capacity of about 935GB, as measured by the OS. That's still a lot of space, by anyone's definition.'" Update: 05/17 21:52 GMT by Z : Adding '^s' missing from article.
Lots of space? (Score:2, Interesting)
I said that when I got my first 6Gb drive a decade ago - that was a hell of a step up from 200Mb - now it wouldn't even fit a quarter of my mp3's on it!
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Now when will the first 1TB drive come out with a name I can trust? (Seriously, how they never retired the DeskStar name is beyond me.)
If you don't know what I mean... [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Darth Vader: I will have the penne all'arrabiata.
Canteen Worker: You'll need a tray.
Darth Vader: Do you know who I am?
Canteen Worker: Do you know who I am?
Darth Vader: This is not a game of who the fu
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
DeskStar = DeathStar ...yup, I've had more DeathStars fail than any other drive except for Connor and big old Maxtors
I'll wait for Seagates, thank you.
Pick your poison (Score:3, Informative)
More recently at home, one of four Samsung 120GB SATA drives in a Linux software RAID-5 array bit the dust. Hmm... just after the three-year warranty expired. What a coincidence! Fortunately, the array kept on chugging along in degraded mode without skipping a beat, and I quickly took the opportunity to back it up - restoring the contents on
Now I need faster broadband (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Now I need faster broadband (Score:4, Funny)
New New Math? (Score:5, Funny)
SUP tag missing - 10^6 and 2^20 (Score:2)
The thing was supposed to be 10<sup>g</sup> and 2<sup>20</sup> which should render 10^6 and 2^20 (slashdot doesn't allow sup tags neither... but you got the point).
Re:SUP tag missing - 10^6 and 2^20 (Score:5, Funny)
why explain prefixes? (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, it seems some Microsoft programmers still don't know the difference. At least most open source apps properly distinguish between binary and decimal prefixes. Not so for Windows...
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
People actually pronounce it "Gib", I don't see a problem with it. Some still say "Gigabyte", but "Gib" seems to be winning out, probably on account of being shorter and simpler to say rather than on being technically more correct.
I hear only Mib and Gibs though, I can't remember ever hearing anyone saying "KiB".
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
And I've yet not heard anyone except annoying geeks use the *bi prefixes.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Firstly, the 'mega' prefix (for example) was defined to mean 10^6
Well, it was defined as such only in the context of SI physical units, which do not include bytes.
Although people have much later tried to define it with respect to bytes as well, there are a large number of people (including myself) who regard this as unwanted interference with something that has worked very well for the majority of the lifetime of the computing field. It has increased confusion, not reduced it, because prior to this me
Re:why explain prefixes? (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Problem is (Score:2)
It's like those 49.99 prices that somehow computes in your brain to $40.
With 1TB being 0.93TB the slack is actually becoming quite large. I remember when I thought 70GB was enormous, and now that just a rounding error? Damn, I'm going to be pissed the next time I fall for it. Just like I was when I lost 35GB on my current drive... damn I'm pissed again.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
From a user perspective, it doesnt matter shit if a byte is 8 bit. That solves the whole "base 10" crisis you seem to have.
Next, gather your brain for some thought: you have a CPU that runs at some Ghz, and memory busses/network cards that run at megabyte/s.
Now guess what kind of "mega" those aspects used from the beginning of time? Yes, SI.
Just for some strage reason, for memory and disks people thought that 1024 is close enought to 1000 as not to matter.
Too bad now we are at 10^9 vs 2^30, wher
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
For example, a 1MiB memory-module can be completely adressed by exactly by precisely 20 adress-lines, for which any combination represents a valid address.
But the "MiB" was only invented in 1998 (and became well-known significantly later than that), so how are you supposed to specify the capacity of the memory-modules you sell in a consumer-friendly way ?
Are you going to claim computer X comes
Why is this still a discussion? (Score:5, Insightful)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix [wikipedia.org] vs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Si_prefix [wikipedia.org]
Re:Why is this still a discussion? (Score:4, Insightful)
The reason why nobody uses "mebibyte", "kibibyte", "gibibyte", and all of these other terms are because of two reasons: they are new and relatively unknown, and they just sound stupid and unnatural (try pronouncing them). It is commonly accepted knowledge in electrical engineering and computer science circles that we use 2^10, 2^20, 2^30, etc. when describing kilobytes, megabytes, and gigabytes, respectively, except when dealing with data storage capacities (which I feel is a marketroid invention and a sales gimmick. "10^9 vs. 2^30? Who'll know the difference?"). It's been that way since the 1960s. The new terms like "mebibyte," "gibibyte," and the rest of them just sound silly, hard to pronounce, and unnatural.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
seriously, The computer uses power of two, it's how it measures things. We should use BI prefix, anything else is just cheap used car saleman gimmicks.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It does except when it doesn't. How many flops exist in a teraflop? The answer is exactly 1 trillion flops.
In any case, hard drives are sold to the public. Most of the public doesn't know how to count in binary. Whether or not the engineers use powers of two is irrelevant when you're marketing something.
I agree that the bi versions should be used if you mean the version that's a power of two. It's silly to have a kilometer be 1000 meters, a
Re:Why is this still a discussion? (Score:5, Insightful)
They are still wrong. The fundamental organization of computers is base 2. Ever try to design a processor that uses 1000 byte pages? Good freaking luck.
The purpose of SI units being in base 10 is because the number system that we use to measure things is ALSO in base 10. Therefore, the unit fits comfortably within mathematics associated with the relative fields. However, A base-10 numbering scheme basically does not exist in the computing world; obscure BCD hardware notwithstanding, all occurrences of base ten in computing are entirely a fiction created by the machine to try to make things more understandable to people used to base 10.
More to the point memory and storage are inherently organized in units of powers of two. Memory will ALWAYS be organized in power-of-two increments as long as computer operate based on the binary system. Why? Because this makes it possible to express divisions of memory in terms of bit boundaries. A power-of-10 memory organization would require computationally heavy division or multiplication operations throughout the memory management code, while a power-of-2 memory organization requires an extremely lightweight bit shift. For this reason, as long as we have binary-based computers, we are stuck with power-of-two units of RAM.
Similarly, a hard drive block will ALWAYS be evenly divisible by the size of a memory page or vice versa. If this were not the case, the complexity of writing an operating system would be beyond insane. Paging and memory mapping of files alone would be enough to make the engineers commit seppuku. Therefore, as long as RAM is organized into groupings based on powers of two, hard drives will always be physically laid out in blocks whose length is a power of two.
Because the fundamental organization of data in a computer is, by nature, organized into power-of-two units, describing storage in power-of-ten units makes no sense, as it will almost always be a crude approximation. There are probably exactly zero hard drives with an exact decimal gigabyte capacity. The fundamental storage in hard drives is a 512 byte block, and 512 does not divide evenly into most multiple-of-ten values. Sure, you could create a 512 decimal gigabyte drive, I suppose, but for the most part, the values just don't divide evenly by 512. Therefore, using a multiple of a power-of-ten number to describe the amount of storage will almost always be a very crude approximation, while using a multiple of a power-of-two number can be (and usually is) an exact value.
In other words, the idiots in charge of making up the SI units should have been taken out and beaten for "Gibibyte". There is one natural unit in computers, and that is the base-2-derived gigabyte. All base-10 units are inherently inaccurate, and thus a poor fit for computing. They should be summarily rejected by the industry, as they simply do not make any sense in the context of storage. Honestly, they don't make a lot of sense for networking, either for the same reason, but I'm willing to overlook that... for now....
Re:Why is this still a discussion? (Score:4, Informative)
Ever try to design a processor that uses 1000 byte pages? Good freaking luck.
No, but these guys [wikipedia.org] did.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, I think it's all the fault of marketers. You get to 1000 before you get to 1024, so hard drive manufacturers can build sooner, and thus market earlier, "40,000,000,000" byte drives rather than true 40 GB drives, or you get to sell a 40 GB drive instead of a 37 GB drive. I never heard anything like "one gigabyte = 1 billion bytes" until HDs started getting into the muti-gigabyte range a
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Ah, but you don't know the size in megs even with the metric prefixes. Well, maybe to the nearest meg, but not to the nearest kilobyte. The actual amount of storage used by that file is 123, 457, 024 bytes (assuming 512-byte allocation units). You can't realistically store a file using a fraction of a disk block, and thus, it is easy to be off far enough to round to a different kilobyte value, but people working in base 10 can't see that because they're playing fast and loose with the allocation units.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Why is this still a discussion? (Score:5, Funny)
What!?! Next thing you'll be telling me is that a kilometer isn't 1024 meters long. Please, stop this madness before it spreads!
Re:Why is this still a discussion? (Score:4, Funny)
Of course, we all know this is an evil conspiracy by the hard drive industry.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Don't be silly. Kibblemeters and bits have nothing to do with each other.
Re:Why is this still a discussion? (Score:5, Insightful)
Manufacturers have an interest in you paying more and getting less, while computers do not. Manufacturers who are successful and have the cash to spend can then lobby international standards bodies to skew "standards" in their favor, regardless of historical context and practical day-to-day usage patterns (both technical and linguistic).
Don't side with "the man" on
Re:Why is this still a discussion? (Score:4, Funny)
* 7 bit bytes
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't try to invent a new notation to make-up for corporate marketing corrupting established and well-understood notation.
Re:Why is this still a discussion? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why is this still a discussion? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I doubt most "ordinary people" even know the *bi prefixes. Much less would have any clue what the difference is.
Reality (Score:3, Funny)
I sure as hell don't want it to say 106 bytes.
Ahh Slashdot (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Ahh Slashdot (Score:5, Funny)
eh, you're not missing anything anyway. TFA is just one of those meager gear review sites with 20 words per page spread out onto 8 pages all mostly covered with a bunch of empty rectangles.
what is the DEAL with all those empty rectangles anyway?
The Obligatory Post... (Score:2)
First review? ummm... Anandtech, March 19th.... (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2
Follow-up RAID performance April 19th:
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2
Follow-up to the follow-up April 23rd:
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2
Sloppy editing. (Score:3, Funny)
Wow, I love ponies.
Formatted capacity? BAH! (Score:2)
WOW, 1TB (Score:5, Interesting)
I remember paying $1000 for my first 1gig drive!
I remember paying $500 for my first 1TB of drive space (6x300gb drives ok 1.8TB unformatted)
I remember paying $350 for my second 1.1TB of drive space (4x320gb Just last week)
I can not wait to get to my first 6TB system! I may have said, many years ago, that I would never fill 1gig, but I know I can fill 6TB It should not take me more than a couple of months.
Man how things have changed!
Then 8mhz, 640k ram and 10megs.
Now 2.4Ghz dual core, 2gig ram, 1.1TB HD
I wonder what we will say in another 16 years.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
There's one big difference though:
When you bought your 10 MB drive, you were going to store your operating system and word processor documents on it, with a few games.
When you bought your 100 MB drive, you stored the same, plus a few MP3s.
When you bought your 1 GB drive, you stored a large part of your music collection on
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Or 320x200 GIF pictures (maybe pr0n)?
Re:WOW, 1TB (Score:5, Insightful)
High quality 1080p video. Animated textures for video games. A massive sample database for a voice synthesizer.
I'm not actually sure what you would do with a 10,000 TB hard disk - but 10 TB is well within the "use it up with some video" range.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
1THz CPU with 1024 cores
6TB memory
110 Petabyte hard drive
And yes, you will need that storage and power for the 3D volumetric virtual girl we will all be using as an 'input' device.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Moore's Law has been pretty accurate for drive capacities, so factor of 1000=10 doublings=15 years. I'd expect "only" 100TB drives in 10 years.
Math (Score:2, Informative)
Megabyte/Terabyte (Score:4, Informative)
First, hard drive manufacturers have always calculated drive space differently than the rest of the entire computing world. It allows them to say that a drive is bigger than it really truly is. They've been able to do it for years, and lawsuits have been lost and won on this very issue. But essentially, their use of the metric words "kilo," "mega," and "giga" are the literal meanings of "1000," "1,000,000" and "1,000,000,000" instead of the computing world's 1024 multiplier.
Therefore, a "kilobyte" to them is 1,000 bytes (as opposed to 1,024 bytes in real life), and a "megabyte" is "1,000,000" bytes (as opposed to 1,048,576 bytes [1024 x 1024]), and a "gigabyte" is 1,000,000,000 bytes (instead of 1,073,741,824 [1024 x 1024 x 1024] bytes in real life).
The real difference in a terabyte? Divide 1,000,000,000,000 by 1024/1024/1024 and you get 931.32 gigabytes. That's a theoretical limit, mind you, and there is overhead for cluster size, partition info, FAT tables, etc., so you really don't even get that.
Doesn't that byte?
Re:Megabyte/Terabyte (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, it is more like the "kilo = 1000" is the real life meaning, and the "kilo = 1024" is something dreamed up by some hacker in his own little world. I mean, one kilogram is 1000 grams, one kilohertz is 1000 hertz, one kilometer is 1000 meters, etc.
"...by anyones definition" (Score:4, Funny)
Note to future self: remember when 1 terabyte was considered a lot of storage? those were the days....
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I look forward to more write-ups like this (Score:4, Funny)
SI prefixes are powers of thousand. (Score:5, Insightful)
While it's takes a while to get used to it, I actually prefer the Bi-units now. 4,3GiB or 4,7GB is already a huge difference when talking about DVD capacity. At terabyte, it gets enormous.
Linux already uses those units.
Only place where I still see a purpose for using binary units in computing is memory - address bus is still addressed exactly with n lines so memory capacity will be 2^n. For all other cases, it's not needed. Yes, the hard drives have 512 to 4096 byte sectors, but who cares when were talking about trillions of them?
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix [wikipedia.org] for more.
I want a 5400 (Score:3, Interesting)
Windoze (Score:3, Funny)
Update (Score:3, Funny)
WTF? now we can't pretend it wasn't a mistake and make fun of the 'stupid' submitter. Curse you!
AACS Compromises (Score:4, Funny)
Other math.... (Score:3, Interesting)
How about some purchasing math?
Just went to Newegg to check on this. Drive is selling for $600, not the $400 the article mentioned. Zipzoomfly has it for $500 but it's out of stock. CDW has it for $450. (Anyone have better hardware buying sources?)
Just below the Hitachi 1TB were the 500Gb drives at ~$150 each. Let's see if I have $600 and the right system to support it, would I take a single 1TB drive or take 4x 500Gb drives and put them in a RAID 5 giving me 1.5TB and faster read speed (if the data is well distributed)? Hmmm
I guess I'm not as much of a geek as I used to be. I don't download very much, I don't rip CDs or DVDs and I don't do much with graphics. I'm guessing the 320Gb I just got in February will last me quite a while. I'll wait for the 2TB drives and the SATA 5 throughput, thank you very much.
New drive storage metrics needed (Score:5, Funny)
I have one - this is what ext3 defaults too. (Score:3, Informative)
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb1 961432072 221096 912372976 1%
Fix one or the other (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm sure anyone who's ever been in a retail situation has had to deal with the ignorant yet logical customer that demanded a 7% refund on their undersized hard drive. In the case of this terabyte drive, we're talking about 70 gigabytes. Most people don't even have 70gb worth of data on their PC (excluding file hoarders)... that is one big marketing discrepancy. The bigger the gap, the louder and more frequently the ignorants will complain.
How hard is it, really, to just quote the proper number ? Or maybe just increase the actual capacity by 7% to avoid printing an odd number like 931gb.
Screw the hitachi! (Score:5, Interesting)
The Seagate (due soon) is a 1000mb drive with 4x250gb platters and (iirc) 32mb of cache.
The increased platter density will slightly increase performance and theoretically decrease cost, it'll slightly reduce heat and also power use too.
On top of this Seagate offer a 5 year warranty on all drives (Hitachi may also, sorry not sure) and Seagate used to be one of the quietest available to boot. (although I hear the 7200.10's suck for noise, apparently some kind of patent issue with using low acoustic mode - hope that's sorted?)
Anyhow, what this does mean for us end users is you'll see 2 platter, 500gb drives which weigh less, cost less, run faster and cost substantially less than the 1000mb models, also the glorious 750gb will become a 3 platter model instead of a 4 platter (my personal 'limit' is 3playtters - after that I find it too prone to noise / heat / failure rate)
I'd say we'll see 80$ (rebate) 500gb drives within 3 months and we'll see the 750's at 169$ or something soon(ish)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
"One megabyte of hard drive space is 1,000,000 bytes: 106 bytes. Operating systems calculate one megabyte as 220 bytes, or 1,048,576 bytes"
What the hell does that even mean? 106 bytes? 220 bytes?
Re:Zonk (Score:5, Informative)
And then the tags got stripped somehow.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Which, reflecting the bloat, will be named Skylight.
Re:Zonk (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Zonk (Score:4, Insightful)
This is still not really correct: One megabyte of hard drive space is 1,000,000 bytes: 10^6 bytes. Operating systems calculate one megabyte as 2^20 bytes, or 1,048,576 bytes.
It should read: Hard disk manufacturing company marketing departments define one megabyte of hard drive space as 1,000,000 bytes: 10^6 bytes. Fucking reality calculates one megabyte as 2^20 bytes, or 1,048,576 bytes.
Re:kibibytes & mibimeters (Score:4, Insightful)
Personally, I wish we'd just get on with it and switch to base 16. It would be so much more convenient, and I'd be back in my early 20s again!
Re:kibibytes & mibimeters (Score:4, Informative)
While the use of feet might be dubious, there's a good rationale for using knots. One minute of latitude is one nautical mile long. This makes it very easy to do quick measurements on a chart while in-flight - since however you have a chart folded, you'll be able to see a longitude line (which has latitude tick marks as it goes up the page).
Re:Zonk (Score:5, Funny)
From this day forward all badly formed posts shall be known as Zonks.
Re:Zonk (Score:4, Funny)
Re:106 bytes and 220 bytes, ??? (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:106 bytes and 220 bytes, ??? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
My first PC with a Hard drive had 32MB (yes MB)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I may have thrown rocks at my neighbor from time to time.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
When my family FINALLY got around to getting a decent family PC, we had a whopping 3GB. I was hot shit on the block for about 6 months.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/harddiskdata.ht ml [mattscomputertrends.com]
This page is great for when you want to date a hard disk or when a certain size disk first became available.
Re: (Score:2)
Sigh. First computer I used with a hard drive stored a whopping 20 megabytes. And we considered it huge. There were lots of mainframe drives in service at the time that were only 100 megabytes (e.g. IBM 3330).
The first computer I owned in my own right had two 720k floppy drives. Then I moved up to a 700 MB hard drive. Now I have several hundred gigs. The "little" external Firewire drive I bought for my laptop is 80GB, and I have a 4GB thumb drive in my back pack.
...laura
Re:Damn... (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
You insensitive clod! I'm using one of those right now!
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
One of the funniest things I've seen lately was when I bought a hard drive a few weeks ago. Maxtor has started using base 2 for their drive sizes. Their 300 GB drives are an actual 300 Gigs instead of the storage-challenged 300 gidebytes (giga decimal bytes---see, I can make up stupid new words, too). They tout this as "Bonus: 20 extra gigabytes". No joke.