Conclusion
Seagate is the first hard drive maker to deliver a hard drive with a capacity exceeding 1 TB. The Barracuda 7200.11 family now sports a 1.5 TB top model, and its test results are ambiguous. On the plus side, the drive delivers excellent throughput of almost 130 MB/s. This is more than Seagate states on the official datasheet and it is a new record for 3.5” 7,200 RPM drives in our test labs. These results are reflected in the PCMark05 file write benchmark.
The 1.5 TB Mammoth is a Storage Drive
However, the drive delivers average I/O performance and it showed a considerably higher power requirement than specified by Seagate. We’ll look into that, but at this point it is safe to say that Seagate’s new 1.5 TB drive is an excellent storage drive, but no more than that. The power consumption is higher than the requirements of other 1 TB drives, but in the context of a 80+ watts in a PC, it may be negligible for many users. Also, if you can reach your target capacity with fewer hard drives, you’ll require less power overall. As long as there is no competition, there is no alternative to getting the Seagate drive. And while it’s certainly good, it doesn’t win across the board.
WD’s RE3 is an Application Drive
The new RAID Edition 3 (RE3) drive from Western Digital was more convincing to us for use as a system drive. Although it is limited to a 110 MB/s throughput, we consider this still sufficient today. The real strength of the RE3 drive is its very quick access time and high I/O performance, which beats the entire 7,200 RPM hard drive competition and leads to nice levels in the performance per watt measurement.
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Why would you go anything other than a fast 80GB drive for system anyway? System drives get fragmented and messed up faster than storage drives and I really wouldn't want to defrag a 1.5TB drive every 2 months.
Ever heard of the term Disk Partitioning LePhuronn ? easy fix
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_partitioning
Funny how adding a Wikipedia link suddenly makes a comment patronising.
I am fully aware, thank you, of disk partitioning. It's fine for basic setups where you want to strip off a portion of your disk for storage, but I use multiple disks at the same time and be buggered if I'm going to hamper disk and system performance trying to get my disk's head to be in multiple places at the same time.
Cock
Cock
Charming...
One reason (for the average user) would be that multiple disks equals more power drain, more chance of failure and increased complexity. System builders are always going to choose single disk options for all but the enthusiast market for exactly these reasons.
Horses for courses.. as ever!
Anybody who is an enthusiast, like the readers of Toms, will have multiple drives to increase performance. SSDs make for good system drives as the access time and throughput really speeds up Windows.
Buy Adaptec 3805 SATA Raid card with battery backup. Put out a LUNs as you need them, 32GB for sys etc. The 256MB Cache will take care of your "heads" going everywhere...
1.5tb is not enuff.. and I dont even have mega fast BB or Hi-def TV.. its all std res video Terabytes of the bleedin stuff.. coming out me ears!
Second that I'm churning out on average about 4Gb of pictures and videos every month from my N95