Hitachi Deskstar 7K2000
So far, there's only one member in the Deskstar 7K2000 family: a 2TB model (common sense, perhaps, but notable since there are actually three versions of the 7K1000 family spanning 160GB-1TB). As mentioned earlier, it utilizes a five-platter design, so each platter stores 400GB, as opposed to 500GB with other manufacturers.
This 7K2000 comes with a 32MB memory buffer, which is pretty standard for premium desktop hard drives today. The 7,200 RPM spindle speed and SATA 3 Gb/s interface aren’t particularly special either. Don't expect mainstream hard drives with 6 Gb/s interfaces until later this year. However, the accelerated interface bandwidth won’t have a noticeable impact on everyday performance anyway, because the drive’s slower throughput when reading from or writing to the physical platters defines actual transfer rate performance. All the faster interface can do is accelerate access to the 32MB buffer. We found that the new Deskstar 7K2000 is fast, but it’s not as fast as the two competitors. The 128 MB/s maximum and 99 MB/s average read throughput are both beaten by our Samsung and Seagate samples.
Hitachi does well in the access time test, where it offers a 14.3ms average access time for reads and a low 5.9ms result for writes. It outperforms the two competitors in all four I/O performance tests. Although none of these drives can compete with flash-based SSDs, which deliver at least hundreds of I/O operations per second, Hitachi still delivers superior I/O numbers in the database, file server, Web server, and workstation runs, with typically 140 or more I/O operations per second. There are a few drives that deliver higher I/O numbers, such as WD’s 10,000 RPM VelociRaptor and some of the latest 1TB and 2TB Caviar Black and RAID Edition drives.
Due to its five-platter design, the Deskstar 7K2000 is at an inherent disadvantage and simply cannot compete in power consumption or efficiency metrics, but it still does well enough in power-per-gigabyte. The pleasant surprise is that this drive is relatively quiet, despite the five-platter design. We measured a low 44.6 dB(A) during database I/O operation—only two other drives are quieter—and 41 dB(A) in idle. This is a great result considering the drive's high complexity and abundance of moving parts.
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Kudos to Western digital on the improvements but I wish some of there competitors would come out with some competition for the raptor series to drive down the prices a little. I wonder if this will happen before SSD's become a standard for desktops.
Kudos to Western digital on the improvements but I wish some of there competitors would come out with some competition for the raptor series to drive down the prices a little. I wonder if this will happen before SSD's become a standard for desktops.
I swapped from 2 x 500gb drives in RAID0 on my desktop to a single 'raptor 300gb. While it's still quick, it's nothing like as fast as the RAID setup, even just using the mobo's crappy RAID controller.
I think in future, I'll stick with RAID0 and regular backups rather than even look at the 'raptors.
So to make this long article succinct; WESTERN DIGITAL is the drive maker you ought/should go with if you want the best over-all/fastest performance. These other drives are just failed attempts at METERED-technology; aka they haven't found new innovation marketing-gimmicks to break out with yet, so they dressed up some some old models with new names and worthless "innovation" filler updates.
Most of you do realize that "metered-technology," has been the mantra of HD makers for the last decade.... Aside from Raptors and SSDs... Mechanical HD's are a fraud... If you bought the cheapest drive out of all the 1-2TB line up, put them in randomly selected boxes; NONE and I mean NONE of you people could discern the diffs between any of these drives w/o running multiple tests over and over again... ONLY the top and bottom drives would show any slight noticeable diffs.
STOP FALLING FOR THIS MARKETING CRAP people... Geesh. Numbers this and that don't mean a thing if your PERCEPTION (reality) of the differences isn't clear. I've had raptors and multiple 1TBs in RAID-0+1 and that was certainly noticeable. Even a plain raptor provides serious access time adv over the rest of these spinning lumps. The more you keep pouring dollars into this metered CON game, the more they'll keep pushing this worthless junk upon us...
Who needs a brand new drive that performs what... less than 10% faster overall than it's 3yr old cousin? Get the WESTERN Digital and call it a day; it's the only mechanical drive manufacturer that actually innovates. 7200 rpm, WHAT A JOKE... they could have LONG went to 10Krpm/or a hybrid/variable-speed (completely negating the whole "green" fraud-line. Why have diff drives, when 1 drive with some NEW AI, could vary the drive's speed based on the conditions it's faced OR that you set for it to run????) technology. But guess what... they played the metered-tech hand a little too long and now Mechanical drives are becoming antiquated junk faster than they can meter it out...
***Prices of memory... huh?*** Umm 128M of flash ram/cache is DIRT CHEAP. There's no (LOGICAL) reason why we don't have 2TB-HYBRID drives with a fat 128M+ of cache etc. You know as well as I do that it's just marketing and metered-tech. Yeah Anand's gotta make cash to pay for staff and such; agreed cost of living... But that's like someone trying to blindingly justify going to the bar and paying $6/draft+$1tip/drink. We all know it's a farce. $6/drink Vs $8 for a 6-er at the deli/gas station... FRAUD. Again "smart" business is 100% anti-consumer; logically so. Business is about making MONEY these days; not innovating beyond the call to make the BEST product. It's about making a product line, then spending the majority of your funds on clever marketing, gimmicks and finding new ways to chop up that product into 10 diff drives, to sell to the stupid public. I work in marketing, so I KNOW exactly how it is; cut the non-sense and soft wrist-slapping Anand-STAFF...
HAIL Raptors & SSDs; they rest is JUNK. Why invest in AILING technology? Get yourselves some cheapo 1TB drives and wait till SSD/Raptors increase in density.
-Reality out...
Whilst I can see the point of innovating to make the best HDDs because SSDs aren't suitable as a high write drive, why don't all these companies spend more time and money researching how to make longer life SSDs rather than shave tenths of milliseconds of access times or tenths of watts off power consumption when SSDs are far far superior in both these respects to HDDs just not suitable due to low multiple write capabilities.
Hmmm... some companies make me wonder sometimes :S
Technobod: i totally agree with you
Agreed also... The marketing game is about these little, finite, and nearly imperceivable numbers. And pitting their numbers against another's in order to claim superiority; reality shows that very few if anyone can perceive the advantages of said numbers. What they ought to be focusing on is RELIABILITY!
__Warranties are declining here and there and nobody seems to make note of it? Newer drives from my exp don't last nearly as long as the older drives. They'll still spin up & go with a little bearing noise ... These new mech/FDBearing drives fail—they fail HARD. Little warning is given by the drive; SMART doesn't help when a catastrophic failure happens.
I'd like to also see SDD manu's focus on density and reliability. These drives are way faster than what most anyone (mass public, since they'll be the one's fronting the cost so they can innovate. Power-users are a small fraction of incoming revenue.) could make use of in their daily lives. A "power-user/performance" 1TB SSD, that's got a 5yr warranty would be a GOLDEN product!