Review of Seagate's 750Gb Hard Drive

Zoxed writes "The Tech Report have a comprehensive review of Seagate's Barracuda-7200.10 'perpendicular' drive, including a primer on the technology. They ran performance tests against 10 other drives, checking the noise and power consumption levels. The Seagate fared pretty well, even on cost (per Gigabyte)." From the article: "Perpendicular recording does wonders for storage capacity, and thanks to denser platters, it can also improve drive performance. Couple those benefits with support for 300 MB/s Serial ATA transfer rates, Native Command Queuing, and up to 16 MB of cache, and the Barracuda 7200.10 starts to look pretty appealing. Throw in an industry-leading five year warranty and a cost per gigabyte that's competitive with 500 GB drives, and you may quickly find yourself scrambling to justify a need for 750 GB of storage capacity."

Scrambling?

[_Hellfire_]

"...and you may quickly find yourself scrambling to justify a need for 750 GB of storage capacity."

With the amount of media stored on my server I can already justify a disk this size. The only downside is of course that you're going to need two of these for your mirror :(

Whoah

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

"Throw in an industry-leading five year warranty..."

Wow, thought those days were gone.

Myth boxes and the like

[debest]

Some keep saying that there's no point to ever-increasing drive storage numbers. I disagree. Huge drives will always be appreciated in media PCs, where good-quality video (even if compressed) takes up a good chunk of storage space. Since these devices are preferably low noise, low power, and small in size, you obviously can't just keep throwing more drives in the box: a single drive is the best solution.

Keep the size increases coming, I've got a mountain of content on DVD and VHS that I'd love to be able to rip to an online media library!

Uh... no

[93 Escort Wagon]

"Throw in an industry-leading five year warranty and a cost per gigabyte that's competitive with 500 GB drives, and you may quickly find yourself scrambling to justify a need for 750 GB of storage capacity."

Maybe I hang around with normal people a bit too much, but I can't see myself getting hot and bothered over a new hard drive. If you need the capacity, then sure - this is great. But c'mon! As far as the "lust after" quotient goes, this isn't exactly in the same league as some new piece of Apple hardware. Heck, it's probably not even in the same league as a low-end Dell box.

Re:Big HUGE warnings

[TheSkepticalOptimist]

Or, you can get three 750gb hard drives and RAID them for security. Put it this way, 3 drives will fit in your box, 7 won't.

Re:Big HUGE warnings

[gelfling]

Maybe yes maybe no. If the likelihood of disk failure is .01%, just an example, then the risk of a failure in any of your 7 disks is .07% so instead of a 99.9% reliability you have 99.3%.

Re:Big HUGE warnings

[muhgcee]

With 7 100GB disks, we have that little problem of power consumption to deal with. And noise. And heat.

Re:Big HUGE warnings - Not quite true

[drhamad]

7x100GB is not 7 times more reliable than one 750 GB drive. It is 7x more reliable at not losing ALL of your data, perhaps, since you could only lose 100GB at a time. But it is not any more reliable for retaining ALL of your data, either. The big advantage in reliability to high capacity drives is the ability to RAID them in a relatively small enclosure - RAIDing 7 or 8 drives would be quite a task, while doing 2-4 drives is relatively easy.

Re:Get perpendicular :D

[JanneM]

my question is, how did the funding for that animation get approved?

Note how the story is about a Seagate product, but the link everyone is posting is for Hitachi. I don't know how it got approved, but whoever pushed for it deserves a raise.

Re:Now all I need...is a backup perhaps?

[gid13]

"there is no reason whatsoever for anyone to lose any data. Even if it means forking over the money"

Psst... Money is a reason.

Re:That's a lot of DVDs

[ericdano]

As in getting TWO of them, and mirroring them. When you get into 100s of Gigabytes, it doesn't make sense to use DVDs (right now, unless you have BluRay or something) to make backups. Get another drive of the same size, or two of them, and mirror them.

Re:Get perpendicular :D

[edzillion]

Did you notice that the ipod-like mp3 player the character was holding said 1 of 30,000 songs. 30 thousand! Does anyone else get the feeling of overload with this avalanche of content? I have noticed that the more music I have ripped on my pc the less I listen to each song. If consumers are said to empathise with their purchases - for instance it has been noted that people value items more when they own them - then having 30k songs or 50k episodes of the daily show surely means that each will get less attention. In these circumstances I find it hard to believe that these items will still hold their value.

Lame excuse.

[WidescreenFreak]

Then you shouldn't be buying such a large hard drive if you can't afford to lose the data that's on it without redundancy or archiving capabilities. That's like buying a luxury car when you can't afford insurance for it.

Big Big Drives are great...but backup is a problem

[haplo21112]

This drive increases the ever widening gap between available storage and backup media. Great I can buy a 750GB drive...however how the hell am I gonna back this thing up...actually even with many many dics how am I gonna backup 750GB. There is a huge disparity in the amount of data we can store these days and the stuff we have to back it up. There is no afforadable backup solution for this much data.

Re:Well...

[CharlieHedlin]

So you just doubled your power requirements, heat output and chance of failure. I would much rather have 2 750GB drives with Raid 1.

I just wish there was an affordable removable media alternative. If I want to have 750GB of storage I have to buy it twice, probably 3 times (online raid 1 for reliability, and an offline drive for backups). In a datacenter enviroment, a nice robotic LTO2 system helps, but I can buy a lot of hard drives for the price of one of those.

Re:Now all I need...is a backup perhaps?

[scarolan]

Money is only a valid reason if the data is worth LESS than the cost of a backup solution. In many cases, the nominal cost of a backup solution is far less than the value of the data on the computer.

Someone may say "I can't afford a new $80 drive to back up my data." But when they lose years of family photos and other documents, that $80 doesn't seem like so much compared to the hundreds or thousands of dollars it costs to do data recovery on a broken hard drive.

Re:Get perpendicular :D

[WuphonsReach]

Well... 750GB (let's say 700GB once we remove the overhead) holds:

200 DVD movies (3.5GB each) or 100 DVD9 movies
500 days of music (128kbps)
1400 TV episodes (44 min, MPEG4)
500 HDTV episodes (MPEG4, 1.4GB/show)

So yes, we're probably getting past that point with music, but not with video yet.

And, IIRC, Project Gutenberg has something like 300-400GB of text files in their library.

Re:Get perpendicular :D

[argStyopa]

TIVO is already making a hash of the 'free television' model.

What happens when someone can have locally an mp3 playlist that rivals that of a local radio station? At least with TV, there is a constant flow of new content - good radio stations too. But most radio is just replaying over and over a list of probably well under 300 songs, with a weekly turnover of what, 5% or less?

The most important factor of hdds...

[abigsmurf]

is not the noise power etc. but if it's going to die after 12 months and take your precious por...data with it.

Urgggg. My brain is melting from the BS

[amcdiarmid]

Raid 5, in most applications means that if one drive fails you have no problems. If a second drive fails before the dead drive is replaced & rebuilt, you are screwed.

Raid 5 with spare(might be called 6 in some vendors terminology), is almost unseen outside the enterprise (read real raid controller, not home nas-box, or home-pc) means if one drive fails that drive will be rebuilt on the spare drive. If a second drive fails before that happens: HEHEHEHEHE (can you say $$$ to ontrack?)

In either case, a power-surge eating your controller will still shaft you. (You did purchase a second controller to sit on the shelf didn't you? Oh, you were using the controller on your motherboard. pffft. and no, it's not raid 6 unless you are a geek running Linux to handle the raid bits.)

There is a reason specialized backup devices exist. Recommended is still off site storage (tape recommended, HD sometimes used.) so if a fire eats your server (farm if you have one) - you still have your data. If you fall down, and want to get back up - you need backup.

Note: (I'm poor and only have a single drive NAS-box with duplicate data. I'm hoping that if it goes down, I can replace it before the machines with the data die. Or vice-versa)

Note2: It's 90 outside & my DSL bridge just melted. I'm cranky and need to get it out of my system before I go to client meeting this afternoon.)

Re:Big Big Drives are great...but backup is a prob

[tuffy]

Buy 2+ and raid-1 them? You'll be basically immune to data loss barring destruction of your computer.

...or accidentally deleting/overwriting something - which the RAID will happily propagate to all the drives instantly.

Get 2 drives, put one in an external enclosure and leave it off when not backing up/restoring. It's not a perfect substitute for tapes, but should be good enough for home use.

Re:Get perpendicular :D

[hackstraw]

I have noticed that the more music I have ripped on my pc the less I listen to each song.

Duh. Especially if you have it on random play, the odds of it being hit, are, well lower with the more content you have.

There is the 90/10 or 80/20 or 99/1 or whatever rules, depending on the situation, but what those guys say is that 90% of the time you will be listening to 10% of the material you have.

Its generally true. However, its still good to have those other 90% laying around for those times when you "really need them".

Other rough examples. You read 10% of your books 90% of the time. 99% of the world's money is owned by 1% of the population. 90-95% of the alcohol consumed in the US is drank by 5-10% of the population. 95% of my complaints/problems/issues from my users comes from 5% of them. Etc, etc, etc.

Re:Now all I need...is a backup perhaps?

[LurkerXXX]

RAID is not a backup. Say it with me. RAID is not a backup.

Not only won't RAID save you from a "rm -rf /", it won't save you if your power supply dies in an ugly way and takes all your attached components with it, your power line gets hit by lightening, and fries everything attached to that outlet, your house/biz gets burgled and they take the computer, you accidently delete a critical file you really need or realize you need it later, etc, etc, etc.

RAID is not a backup.

A backup is an offline copy that you can store at an off-site location just in case one of many many 'bad things' happen.

RAID is simply a way of increasing your uptime in case a single component fails. It's not a backup.

Re:Myth boxes and the like

[drasfr]

I totally agree with the usefullness of disk storage... I have personally so many uses...

I am a photographer. raw photos I take are easily 100MB. In a photoshoot i easily take 50 to ... 400... Once I work on them in photoshop I do like keeping the originals PSDs, which very often amounts to 500MB or more PER PHOTO. I try to usually limit to 500MB because of disk space and my computer/drive gets too slow. Image if each photo I work are 500MB. I could only store 2 of my originals per GB of space... Now imagine I want to store different revisions... I used to have a 250GB drive, mirrored. Got filled up very quickly.

I don't care about music, but I am also into video editing and archiving. 12GB/hour is what my camera require for disk space.

Oh yes, I do have a mythtv box that I am currently building, I can't imagine how much diskspace I may want to this, and in total.

so yes. bring on disk space. I will never have enough and will always find a way to fill it up - LEGALLY. I am probably going to upgrade my 900GB file server (4x300GB, raid 5) i have at home and replace all the drives with 750GB. It is probably going to last me 6 months to a year?

but it is true that for most people there is no need for such amount of space. my parents have plenty of space... and they only have 80GB...