An In-Depth Look At Seagate's 1.5TB Barracuda 283
theraindog writes "More than a year and a half after the first terabyte hard drives became widely available, Seagate has reached the next storage capacity milestone. With 1.5 terabytes, the latest Barracuda 7200.11 serves up 50% more capacity than its peers, and at a surprisingly affordable $0.12 per gigabyte. But Seagate's decision to drop new platters into an old Barracuda shell may not have been a wise one. The Tech Report's in-depth review of the world's first 1.5TB hard drive shows that while the latest 'cuda is screaming fast in synthetic throughput drag races, poor real world write speeds ultimately tarnish its appeal."
Write speed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Speed can matter for video, particularly on higher quality settings. For example, using Windows Media Center with "Best" quality, according to MS's website, 60 GB will hold about 22 hours of video, which equates to about ~0.8 MB/s. If you are recording two shows with a dual tuner and watching a third that you already recorded, you're up to ~2.4 MB/s total throughput. If you aren't swimming in RAM for the disk cache, the HD head is going to be losing a lot to seek and rotational latency.
Since a lot of home
Re:Write speed (Score:5, Informative)
A whopping 2.4 MB/s (+ overhead, as you say)?
You realize that most modern drives are able to handle 60 MB/s with ease, even the low end ones, right?
You don't need 6 hard drives RAIDed to *watch* video...
Re: (Score:2)
Mod parent up.
Ask any MythTV user about how they can record a pair of HD streams while watching a third with no skips. That's about 7MB/second, and drives don't break a sweat on that.
Re: (Score:2)
Who has only 1 harddrive that is tech savvy enough to need a 1.5TB drive and uses it to record two shows at once while watching a show? A non geek should be fine with a 1TB drive... or 500 probably.
Re: (Score:2)
Anyone with a Tivo...
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
There are two criteria for a media centre PC: lots of storage space and small size. Oh, and minimal heat production, so loud fans aren't required.
All of this points to a single, high capacity disk as the optimal solution.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I'm inclined to agree with you. Also worthy of note is that most of the other drives in the test are actually more expensive, despite having less space. And guess what, most of the ones on the test that come in at a lower price are also ones that are outperformed by the new drive on virtually every test. So yes please, I'll take 50% more space for better read speeds and less money, not to mention a 5-year warranty. I've purchased Seagate drives exclusively for about 4 years now, and have yet to have one fai
Re:Write speed (Score:5, Insightful)
How important is throughput?
For what I'll use them for? Not very. Looks like they've got great stats for bulk storage, and any more demanding segments I can stripe and/or cache anyway (with memory prices where they are, it's not like you hit swap anymore).
Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience. Lack of capacity, not quite so easily. So several of these are definitely on the shopping list. (Mmm, mythtv storage...)
Re:Write speed (Score:5, Funny)
Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience.
That is just true. So from now on, it should be written...
Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience.
--Znork
Re:Write speed (Score:5, Insightful)
I suppose 5400RPM is slow in terms of transfer and seek time, and being a software RAID5 set managed in software via mdadm likely also reduces the speed of the array. However none of that speed decrease is readily apparent due to the relative bottleneck of the 1GBPS ethernet connection.
I assume that drives of this size primarily would see similar use as the drives I use. Given the experience I've had, I agree that the speed of the drive probably doesn't matter so much. I doubt many people would use a 1.5TB drive for their OS or swap space, especially if speed mattered.
The speed people probably would be using some ultra wide scsi drives or some other speed oriented drive, perhaps the raptor line.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Uh oh, are you running Linux? Are you aware of the head parking problem with these drives?
http://kerneltrap.org/node/14912 [kerneltrap.org]
Re: (Score:2)
I will not consider another purchase until USB 3 or Firewire3200 is available.
Re: (Score:2)
I agree. I got a 750 gig drive in my desktop, and its actually partitioned out, for three OSes, and one large storage area. All my other drives are used for storing photos and video, and are ALL externals. I care much more about how well the data holds up over time, and how well the drive handles shock, than the throughput. Shoot, my 750 gig external is hooked up via USB2 to my Dish Network HD reciever. Even when I am storing broadcast HD, you are only dealing with 17Mbps (a little more than 2MBps).
The exce
Re:Write speed (Score:5, Insightful)
That aside, this drive actually performed near the top in most of the tests and middle of the pack in most of the others, so the author talking bad about its performance was pretty unfounded. And I didn't see anything in any of the tests that would make me choose from the drives tested on anything other than cost and capacity. The truth is, in the "real world" everyone is clammering to compare the drives in, you'd never have a clue which drive was in your computer unless you opened up the case and looked.
Re:Write speed (Score:4, Insightful)
Because obviously any disk not used for your operating system or applications would be connected using USB or Firewire, couldn't be that some people actually connect their SATA drives directly to the SATA bus in their computers, right?
/Mikael
Re:Write speed (Score:5, Insightful)
No, he asked in his first post how many would be connected to a low-speed bus, and he clarified his point when someone else who couldn't read mentioned swap files. Here, I'll quote it for you:
I'd be interested in knowing what percentage of these drives are going in external enclosures. For the time being, 1.5tb is much larger than you'd need to be running any applications off of and I'd guess the majority of these drives are going to be storing movies, mp3s and photos, where the speed hardly matters at all.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1003109&cid=25457241 [slashdot.org]
So if you weren't intentionally trolling, it definitely came off that way.
There's a bit of truth to what he says, too. Lots of people use drives this size for what is effectively long-term storage. They use it for their movie collections, their music, their HD TV shows, etc. Without that, in fact, the market for these drives would be really, really small--limited, if I were guessing, to people working with video. Write-performance will have a pretty big impact in that market, but just about anywhere else where this kind of massive storage is used, it's probably going to be negligible.
SATA can be used externally (Score:2)
There are eSATA connectors. These days you just get a bog standard SATA drive and put it in an enclosure. The OP was mistaken in assuming that anyone buying one of these drives for external use (no mention of USB or Firewire in the OP) would be using a low speed bus.
So, GP was being sarcastic but not a troll.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Eh, there are two main points which got conflated.
1) A drive this size will likely not be used for high-performance tasks. That is, it will probably be used for storage of music and movies rather than for applications and swap.
2) That enclosures will be slow.
Point 1 still hasn't been contested, and the first "troll" post didn't seem to care to discuss that--he just seemed to want to attack the idea that someone would only use a disk this size on a slow bus. The more I think about it, the more it sounds tr
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
speed always matters, just not as much as $/GB most times, at least where these drives are destined it doesn't matter as much as speed
Re:Write speed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Write speed (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
If you need a 1.5 TB swapfile, I suggest you start clicking some of those X's on your windows.
Re:Write speed (Score:5, Informative)
If your server has 128GB of ram then a 256GB swap file is 'normal'.
Only if you're pedantically following advice from 10 years ago. Swap "must be" 2x RAM was a suggestion at one time, but hardly required, and perhaps not even universally agreed upon best practice.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Swap performance is going to suck no matter where you put it, except maybe solid state. If you're hitting swap so hard that the performance of said swap is a real issue of concern for you, you really ought to consider buying more RAM.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Swap? You need to buy more RAM. Swap should never be in regular use, only extraordinary use, and a few MB/s won't matter once the system grinds to a near halt once it starts hitting swap.
Re: (Score:2)
Even 3D animation and video editing aren't going to eat up 1.5 TB until you hit the professional level, at which point you can probably afford a RAID solution.
Having said that, this tech will improve over time, and I would just like to point out that we now have more storage space available on a single hard drive than in any one human brain (well, probably. Unless there's some sort of "intron/alternate splicing" analogue going on in the brain)
Re: (Score:2)
I would argue that you need a RAID solution regardless. Assuming you use the bulk of that drive, backing up ~1TB of data in event of drive failure can be a pain. With those sized drives, I'd only go with RAID 1/5/6/combo anyway.
Re: (Score:2)
RAID 1/5/6 will have worse write speed, anyway. RAID 0 is what you're looking for, but you want to use it only as a working drive, and transfer completed (and to some extent, even intermediary) work to safer storage as soon as possible.
Of course, we're mostly talking about raw video here. Working with anything compressed, and you can probably get away with simpler, safer solutions from the get-go.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I came into this thread to post the same message for the most part. Though as size increases, so does risk of failure [blogspot.com], as I'm finding out.
Re: (Score:2)
A raid doesn't replace backups. It is an aid in maintaining up time and increase speed.
The problem is that backup media is now really lagging storage. I use external drives as back ups but they are not my first choice. Right now they are my only one for some data sets.
Another back up I have become really fond of are flash drives. I keep one attached to my PC all the time as an extra backup. Just copy the source directory to it as well as the server.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Though as size increases, so does risk of failure [blogspot.com], as I'm finding out.
That blog post forgets one thing: sector remapping.
With any actual redundant system (i.e., not RAID-0), you increase the likelyhood that the data is still there somehow. The drive with the unrecoverable read error re-maps the sector and the RAID software/firmware uses the redundancy to recover the correct data and write it back to the re-mapped sector.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
there's a not insignificant chance that the stress of constant reading has killed one of the remaining good drives.
You are assuming that "stress" (high use) is a contributing factor to hard drive failure. This may not be so. [engadget.com]
Re: (Score:2)
You mean like I said here.
"Actually for really high performance databases and video editing systems they will use RAIDs of really fast drives like the Western Digital VelociRaptor or if money is no issue at all 15k RPM SAS drives."
You are without question correct in an enterprise setting. Raid 5 isn't too bad with a good hardware controller and offers a good compromise of speed and size for a small departmental server. I would still use RAID 1+0 but I know people that are just too cheap for their own goo
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
An In-Depth Look At Seagate's 1.5TB Barracuda: (Score:5, Funny)
0|1|1|1|0|1|0|0|0|1|1|0|1|0|0|1|0|1|1|0|1|1|1|0|0|1|1|1|1|0|0|1|0|0|1|0|0|0|0|0
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
<>|--|--|--|<>|--|<>|<>|<>|--|--|<>|--|<>|<>|--|<>|--|--|<>|--|--|--|<>|<>|--|--|--|--|<>|<>|--|<>|<>|--|<>|<>|<>|<>|<>
Re: (Score:2)
I'm guessing it's a reference to "an in-depth look". That's supposed to be the binary stored on the platters.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Ahhh....
I was hoping it was a futurama reference.
hmm (Score:2)
I seem to recall someone saying many times over that this was not the first 1.5TB, but that it's claimed anyway (with more specifics, like "first consumer") etc.
Beyond that, insert 1.5TB ought to be good enough for anyone, and will it blend jokes here.
I wonder . . . (Score:3, Interesting)
But they didn't even do 1T right... (Score:5, Interesting)
Has anyone else noticed that a large number of the Seagate 1T drives fail on you in 30 days. The same is true for samsung and WD. Even with the Hitachis I get 1/5 failed out of the box. I still buy all Hitachis though, because the ones that do work keep working. Why are we moving to 1.5T when the 1T are too buggy to be useful. (BTW, my epxerience is based on buying 100+ drives).
Re: (Score:2)
It seems like they'll either fail in the first three months or not at all. Given that, the 5 year warranty probably doesn't cost Seagate any more than a 1 year one would. I generally stick with the ES drives though and I've only seen one early failure there.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
No, not really... And though not a statistically significant sample size, I currently have four (three different brands) in use, with a single failure that came DOA due to shipping damage.
I have noticed, however, that the 750+GB drives run a good bit hotter than their smaller counterparts, with the 7200RPM models even worse.
Once upon a time, I would merely mount HDDs in such as way as to passively encourage dec
Re:But they didn't even do 1T right... (Score:4, Interesting)
The data from Google's study [google.com] say that lowering drive temperatures to below 35C increases their failure rate, particularly when they're new. I'm not sure I agree with the entirety of their methodology, but it's certainly persuasive enough that I've switched to aiming for 35-40C rather than sub-30C. That normally means the same basic approach you outlined, putting a single large and slow fan in front of the drives, but with some way to slow it down even further than the defaults if necessary. I don't hesitate like I used to in mounting drives in adjacent bays either.
I suspect the true cause of the correlation you suggest (drives >750GB fail more often) is mainly due to the switch to the perpendicular recording methods that started in larger capacity drive around that same time.
Re:But they didn't even do 1T right... (Score:5, Interesting)
If you take a look at the newegg reviews [newegg.com], you'll find 16% of them give the 1TB 7200.11 drive a 1 star review, most of which are because of DOA or D shortly after A. So it's not just you who noticed.
Seagate's Barracuda line had a good run with high reliability for quite a while. If you check the reliability database at storagereview [storagereview.com] (unfortunately you have to go through some trouble to become a member and see the data), the Barracuda ATA III, IV, and V are ranked near the top--92, 90, and 96th percentile respectively. Then things went way downhile--7200.7 hits 88, the 7200.8 at 49, and the 7200.9 at 43. That matches my own anecdotal experience.
Sometime after the 750GB drives came out reliability took a further dive south. I believe that was caused by switching a large amount of production to a new plant in Thailand (the reliable models came out of Singapore). That seems to be the inevitable way hard drive manufacturing works--whenever some company moves to a new facility, quality dives for a few years afterward. I predict that 5 or 10 years from now talk will be about how reliable the old Thai drives were compared to the new junk coming out of [new country of origin].
Re:But they didn't even do 1T right... (Score:4, Interesting)
Check to see if it was from Thailand. Not that I have anything against the country (their food is delicious!) but the manufacturing plant there has been churning out sub-par drives in certain models. Check the newegg reviews on your specific drive.
As far as this drive though, I recently got this exact drive (the 1.5TB). The write and read speeds, though not documented, seem right on par with my other sata drives (one is 300GB Maxtor with 32MB cache, the other is 320GB Seagate with 16MB cache. Both SATA with the limiter jumper removed.) I only use the 1.5TB drive (actual space is about 1.35TB) for media storage, formatted in NTFS but used mainly in Ubuntu 8.04. It, however, was from Thailand so I'm a little worried. I keep all the stuff I've backed up on it on other drives and plan to until a few months have passed the trial. Ran seagate tools and the drive passed all tests.
Screw capacity, I want reliability (Score:2, Interesting)
Anyone have a recommendation for a drive manufacturer whose quality has improved over the years, and actually makes good consumer drives? I'm so disgusted with Seagate I'm even willing to consider C
Re: (Score:2)
I'm so disgusted with Seagate I'm even willing to consider ... Maxtor
No! Don't!
Unless you WANT to hit F4 to finish booting up your computer every time you turn it on.
Re: (Score:2)
Unless you WANT to hit F4 to finish booting up your computer every time you turn it on.
Well, that depends. Will my system remain booted afterwards? Because the crappy seagate drive I bought was causing my system to crash when it was otherwise running. If the system is reliable enough to not need to be rebooted, I'll take a minor booting inconvenience for that.
Re: (Score:2)
Err... Connor is long gone, dude. Been Seagate since 1996.
Customer Service and Cost (Score:2)
When everyone are in a tight race to the bottom (of price bracket) it's hard to have extra money to pay for decent support staff. I've always anticipated that at some point this mad drive to lower cost will have to halt, as surely the cost of material has only been going UP over the years (petro that is the basis of nearly everything hasn't exactly went down over the past eight years despite of its recent (short-term) fall); it's logically absurd to expect price of tech products to continue falling.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, terrible customer support. I had to fill out this RMA form that took like 5 minutes, then I had to ship the old drive back, THEN I had to wait 1 whole week for a new drive to show up.
Man, that was hard.
Connor has been gone for years and Maxtor is the worst manufacturer of them all, where the hell did you come from?
Re: (Score:2)
I had to fill out this RMA form that took like 5 minutes, then I had to ship the old drive back, THEN I had to wait 1 whole week for a new drive to show up.
Some of us remember a time when customer support was important enough that companies would be willing to cross-ship the drives - send you a replacement before you send back your defective one so you can try to get your data off.
And where did you get the shipping material from? When I was getting ready to send mine back they told me that if I did not use the very specific containers and packing methods, they would void the warranty and not ship anything back. And being as I had already thrown out my ori
Re: (Score:2)
That's also (pa
More like.. (Score:2, Funny)
Capacity is everything! (Score:2)
Yowza! Bring it on! That 15-disk array just got much larger. Roughly, at the rate of growth of data at my company, we wouldn't run out of space for nearly 10 years. I think I can handle that.
storage capacity boggles the mind (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow. My first hard drive was 20mb. I bought a keychain flash drive the other day with 16gb of storage. I can go on youtube and watch playthrough recordings of games that had me going ZOMGWTF!!! 15 years before that phrase was even coined. I remember being blown away by how incredibly awesome the newer Sierra adventure games were once they supported VGA graphics.
I remember how cool I thought it was when I could dub my dad's old sabbath records off onto a tape and bring my tunes with me on the go. It boggles the mind that I can fit dozens of albums on a single mp3 player. The Internet makes Asimov's concept of the Encyclopedia Galactica appear small and pathetic, we're seeing more and more scifi computer technology made real each and every day. Snow Crash, anyone? With how the economy's tanking, I expect burbclaves are just a few years off.
Makes me wonder what I'll be thinking given another ten years of progress, what will be boggling my mind then?
Who cares about speed? (Score:2)
Linux will freeze with these 1.5TB drives (Score:5, Informative)
However, if write-cache is enabled (default) Linux will freeze intermittently reporting a SATA timeout executing a cache-flush command.
Tested with the 2.6.24 and 2.6.26 kernels. Other people have reported the same problem with the 2.6.27 kernel.
Tested with multiple drives and multiple SATA controllers (different chipsets). No SMART errors logged.
Thread on the Seagate support forum: http://forums.seagate.com/stx/board/message?board.id=ata_drives&thread.id=2390 [seagate.com]
The workaround is to disable write-cache on the drive.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
How reliable is the thing?
Buy me one and I can promise status updates.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Capacity is hardly news anymore (Score:4, Informative)
I've had the same experience - Seagate has consistently outlasted every the drive brand I've seen. Based on past experiences, I'd rank them, from least reliable to most, as:
Hitachi
Western Digital
Maxtor
Samsung
Seagate
Drive brands not listed I either have no experience with or not enough to form an opinion.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Capacity is hardly news anymore (Score:5, Funny)
I've managed to fill 2/3rds of my 1TB storage drive already.
Your wrist must be tired!
Re: (Score:2)
640 GB of porn ought to be enough for anybody!
Seriously, my experience has been remarkably similar to yours, except without the little care and maintenance bit. I once dropped one of these [newegg.com] down the stairs at a LAN party. Worked just fine afterward. I've also had good luck with Maxtor, however one of these died after only 10 years of use (in an incident perhaps relating to a Coke set on it), so I generally buy Seagate.
Re: (Score:2)
Another pretty-close-to-ditto. I've had Seagates die, WDs die, and I've had (more) Maxtors die, BUT, it's mostly because I mistreat the drives badly, running them bare, sitting upended on my desktop, outside the computer they're connected into, sometimes with and sometimes without additional cooling. They get hot, they get ESD, they get dusty,... and they occasionally die. The big difference (since I have all data backed up on DVD-R anyway) is that the Seagates are still under warranty and I get the hard
Re:Capacity is hardly news anymore (Score:4, Interesting)
I have a very old Seagate drive (well, it says Seagate ST41200N on the top, but windows recognizes it as Imprimis 94601-15). It is a 1.2GB (991MB) 5.25" full height drive and it works perfectly. I have another one, a bit younger (ST34520N) ~4GB, it also works very well. All the new ones also work well, so when I buy a hard drive, I buy Seagate.
I wonder why nobody is making 5.25" hard drives anymore... With current technology they could have at least 10TB capacity...
Re:Capacity is hardly news anymore (Score:5, Informative)
I wonder why nobody is making 5.25" hard drives anymore... With current technology they could have at least 10TB capacity...
Two words:
Angular Momentum
At the outside of the disk there would be an incredible amount of stress on the rotating media.
The head seek times would go up as well....
Though, while 7200+ RPM would certainly be out, and likely 5400 RPM as well (remember the old drives ran <= 3600RPM, I would consider a 4200 RPM 10 TB drive for near-line storage...
even 5.25/FH that would be a decent volumetric density (equivelent to 5x 3.5" drives).
-nB
Re: (Score:2)
This is roughly my experience as well. The Hitachi (formerly branded as IBM) DeskStars we've called DeathStars for quite some time for good reason. Each and every Western Digital HDD that I've had under my roof has died on me within a year or two. Quantum was the worst on my list and I was quite concerned about Maxtor drives when they bought out Quantum. So far my first/current Maxtor drives are still running after a year.
I swear by Seagate and love having drives that are warrantied for five years. I've onl
Re: (Score:2)
And based on my experiences I'd put Maxtor at the top (Well, the old Quantum at the top, but since I don't believe they make consumer drives anymore...), followed by Seagate, with WD in dead last. Of all the hard drives I've owned, the only ones that have failed were WDs. Two of 'em. Neither lasted more than a year.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course, everyone has their own drive horror stories, and there are many people who swear by a brand that others swear at.
Overall, I've had every brand die in every stage of their lifetimes, and I've found that I've RMA'd far more Seagate drives than any other brand. It's not that they are any worse, it's just that with the 5-year warranty, they are far more likely to still be in warranty.
So, I tend to buy the drive that best fits my needs and has a 5-year warranty. I've got Maxtor, Western Digital, and
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Seagates are quieter than almost all others
That may have been true 6-7 years ago, but after the legendary Barracuda IV and (even better - if very short-lived) V-series, Seagate has gone badly downhill when it comes to silence. If you check out www.silentpcreview.com [silentpcreview.com] you'll see that Seagate hasn't been on top for years - Samsung has, and Western Digital has also been a good choice for the last two years, or so. My own experience also supports this assessment.
Re: (Score:2)
Now, is the barracuda line, or there other drives as well?
Re:Capacity is hardly news anymore (Score:4, Informative)
Been a long time since I was in the business as a reseller, but we used to have more WDC failures then Seagate. But we'd get cases of both that had 20-30% of drives that were sealed from the factory, that were either DOA or had cascading bad sectors. But that was back in the days of absolute crap when everyone was in the size race.
Things change in 10 years, I do like the current brand of Samsung drives.
Re: (Score:2)
I only use Seagate. The only company offering consumer hard drives with a 5 year warranty.
They put their money where their mouth is, and their RMA process is easy and fast. You'd really be crazy to buy from anyone else unless you replace your drives every year.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
You think Seagate is the only company to offer consumer hard drives with a 5 year warranty?
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=488&language=en [wdc.com]
It's not that hard to find 5 year warranty mentioned on the WDC website.
Black = WD6401AALS 5 year warranty
Blue = WD6400AAKS 3 year warranty
Green = WD6400AACS 3 year warranty
And to add to the fun the Black has twice the cache and is only about $10 more than the Blue at 640GB.
Seagate is by no means a bad company but they aren't the only game in town.
Re: (Score:2)
I only use Seagate. The only company offering consumer hard drives with a 5 year warranty.
I'm not sure what you mean by "consumer hard drives", but both Western Digital and Maxtor (which admittedly is now part of Seagate) offer 5-year warranties on at least most of their drives.
One thing to watch out for is that drives sold in external enclosures typically have only a one year warranty, even though they use the same drive that when purchased bare has a 5-year.
Re:fp? (Score:5, Funny)
Hey, everybody's thinking it, I'm just saying it. ;)
Re:True Tebibyte? (Score:2)
You mean a Tebibyte, or 1024 Gibibytes?
Re: (Score:2)
In what other field does "tera" mean anything other than 10^12?
How many Hertz in a Kilohertz as it relates to a computer? 1024? 1000?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
SI prefixed only have standardized meanings when used with SI base units. The byte is not an SI base unit. Actually, there is no official SI base unit for information, but if there were one it would most likely be the bit, which is already associated with base-10 SI prefixes. Mixed units (e.g. MB/s) vary depending on how the value is calculated, but are generally SI.
kilobits, megabits, terabits: SI prefixes
kilobytes, megabytes, terabytes: binary prefixes
The HDD manufacturers want to use real SI units they
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
And it also looks better to write "200GB" on a LTO-1 tape and then add the fine print on the other side of the box (assuming 2:1 compression).
Can anyone explain to me how this "tradition" (of writing double capacity) came to be?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
That was due to the drives having built-in compression. And it turns out that 2:1 was about right at the time for a typical storage mix of code (which would get around 1.6:1) and data (text / spreadsheet files would get up to 5:1).
But now, most of the data on a large drive is already in a compressed format.
Terabyte Tebibyte? (Score:4, Interesting)
Please don't say that word. It sounds like something my 3 month old niece says. Rather, call it Decimal/fake terabyte (found on hard drives) or just a (real) 'terabyte'. I think it's pathetic people have come up with some new (baby sounding) word because hard drive manufacturers are too f'ing arrogant to make 'true' sizes. In marketing 1TB/1000GB sounds a little bit better than 931GB..
Please don't abuse the word Terabyte, or attempt to usurp any of the other base-10 prefixes which were defined long before computers were invented. It is the base-2 interpretation of these prefixes which is fake.
The abuse started with use of kilo to denote 2^10 instead of 10^3, often using K instead of k as prefix. This was relatively innocuous, since the case of the letter could ensure the prefixes were somewhat distinct. However, for 10^6, the prefix for mega is M (and m is also allocated for milli), and abusing this prefix to mean 2^20 is unconscionable.
The kibi, mebi, gibi, etc. prefixes were created to solve a real need. The base-10 prefixes were already assigned, and could not be usurped.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I am sick of this stupid fucking argument. A 1.5TB drive storing 1,500,000,000,000 bytes is a lot more sensible than a 1.5TB drive storing 1,649,267,441,664 bytes (actually 1.5TiB).
Do you really CARE about the exact number of bytes on the drive? Do you lovingly count each and every one of them? Or do you just care "1.5TB holds 50% more than 1TB, let me buy that one". Since all of the drive manufacturers use t
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
This is a Consumer-level SATA drive. IF someone even gets by the size of the drive the next thing they'll see is the price. At ~180 bucks it's honestly a steal!
Even the most hardcore of gamers / power users would see that price point and say RAID Array, here I come!
Re: (Score:2)
Even the most hardcore of gamers / power users would see that price point and say RAID Array, here I come!
Not me. I hate RAID even more than morgan hates dishonest people.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The big news is the single-drive capacity reached 1.5TB meaning that external multi-drive enclosure could now reach 3TB.
Re: (Score:2)
LaCie's had 2TB models out for a while now. Why is 1.5TB important?
...because the LaCie is just two 1TB drives in RAID 0?
Re: (Score:2)
... I was waiting for that.
I hear, though, that even when it's filled to full 1.5TB capacity, it contains only 250GB of actual information, what with all the repeating itself and random $maverick insertions, you betcha.
Re: (Score:2)
Did you hear about Seagate's new Sarahcuda drive?
If you stand on top of it you can see Russia?