Three New Desktop Hard Drives For 2010
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One of the benefits of boosting areal density is that it allows hard drive manufacturers to pack more data onto fewer rotating platters. Not only are they able to achieve higher total capacities, but the most popular capacity points--500GB and 1TB, for example--can be achieved with simpler drives.
Thanks to higher per-platter capacities, the current barrier of 2TB per drive will fall in 2010. However, speed, cost, capacity, and power consumption have to be in mixed in a way that users will accept. We looked at three new premium desktop hard drives from Hitachi, Samsung, and Seagate to see if they strike the right balance.
Up to Five Platters
Hitachi Global Storage Technologies has enjoyed a bit of success its high-capacity hard drives, which typically employ more platters than the competition. The recent Deskstar 5K2000, as well as the first-generation Deskstar 7K1000 at 1TB, are both based on five platters, as was the 7K500. Hitachi believes that a higher platter count with less storage density per platter offers the most robustness, despite the fact that more platters generally means increased heat, higher power consumption, and one more mechanical component that could go bad. Fortunately, while we don’t have specific failure rates, we know that the last Hitachi five-platter drive generations didn’t receive much negative press.
As always, there is no perfect approach. Most drive makers typically try to reduce platter counts as quickly as possible. The main reason is the so-called sweet spot in the hard drive market, where you have high capacity with an ideal cost-per-capacity ratio. Obviously, using only a single platter provides the lowest overall cost, and whomever can offer the highest capacity on only one platter has a competitive advantage. Also consider each drive's rotation speed, which has a noticeable influence on performance, power consumption, and storage density.
New Drives
This review includes three very different 3.5” desktop hard drives. Hitachi’s Deskstar 7K2000 is the firm’s new 2TB flagship, featuring five platters. Samsung sent us its Spinpoint F3 at a rather modest 1TB capacity point. Lastly, Seagate provided a Barracuda XT 2TB, one of the company's latest high-performance drives. As always, we looked at performance, power consumption, noise, and overall efficiency.
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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!