Review of Seagate's 750Gb Hard Drive 414
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."
Re:Scrambling? (Score:5, Interesting)
And, do firewire enclosures support them?
Not just RAID controllers... (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm betting that in a situation where you need the utmost in high-traffic-load, direct-attached storage like on a heavily loaded transactional database server running Oracle or similar, that the U320 SCSI disks connected to a good hardware-caching raid controller card still are the unbeatable king daddy paw-paw of sustained thruput.
The real reason why this drive is great (Score:2, Interesting)
High-definition MythTV box is *wonderful* (Score:5, Interesting)
As the owner of a MythTV box equipped with dual HD cable boxes (*and* fortunate enough to have a cable provider that doesn't 5C encode its HD premium movie channels) and a HD over-the-air capture card, all of which I can use simultaneously, I can testify to that.
Here's my experience with bandwidth use:
* Digital non-HDTV channels generate the smallest files at about 900-1000MB/hour for a movie channel and up to 1200MB/hour for a cartoon (with probably a lower-quality feed).
* Analog channels such as TCM generate about 2900MB/hour due to the extra noise.
* HDTV premium movie channels generate about 4400MB-4700MB/hour.
* A high-bandwidth HDTV channel (defined as HDNet or Discovery HD Theater and most network affiliates over cable or over-the-air) generates 7400-7700MB/hour . . .
* Except for ABC and Fox, whose 720p programs record at about 5.8GB/hour.
On the MythTV box's dedicated NAS, I have (according to MythWeb) 176 programs, using 1.6 TB (324 hrs 32 mins) out of 1.8 TB (111 GB free). Almost all of the programs are high-definition movies. Examples:
* The Untouchables, 125 minutes, 16GB
* St. Elmo's Fire, 120 minutes, 15GB
* Shakespeare in Love, 125 minutes, 16GB
* Ben-Hur, 215 minutes, 15GB
* The Matrix Revolutions, 135 minutes, 11GB
* A Passage to India, 165 minutes, 21GB
* La Bamba, 110 minutes, 14GB
* Mona Lisa Smile, 120 minutes, 6.1GB (Commercials transencoded out)
* Spider-Man 2, 135 minutes, 12GB
* Batman Begins, 150 minutes, 11GB
* Seabiscuit, 180 minutes, 10GB (Commercials transencoded out)
* Witness, 115 minutes, 11GB
* The Passion of the Christ, 135 minutes, 9.8GB
* The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, 205 minutes, 19GB
* Doctor Zhivago, 215 minutes, 14GB
* Emma, 129 minutes, 12GB
* Bye Bye Birdie, 124 minutes, 16GB
* Giant, 204 minutes, 26GB
* GoodFellas, 154 minutes, 12GB
* Bullitt, 124 minutes, 16GB
* Real Genius, 119 minutes, 11GB
* Pulp Fiction, 164 minutes, 12GB
. . . etc., etc. Many of the larger-sized films were recorded off of HDnet Movies, which is an especial godsend for any movie lover. (I *can't wait* for the day TCM starts broadcasting in HD!) My all-time champion, now unfortunately lost in a box rebuild, was NBC's The Sound of Music annual broadcast. Four hours, including commercials, and 28GB!
Fabulous for scientific use... (Score:5, Interesting)
But Solar Dynamics Observatory [nasa.gov], which is currently being built, will generate about 3 TB of data per day. We're all a little worried about how to distribute, store, and use such vast quantities of data. Perpendicular-storage drives like these just might save the day...
On-line storage will become popular soon (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Fabulous for scientific use... (Score:3, Interesting)
Seems to me that needing to distribute this kind of data is _exactly_ the sort of impetus needed to kickstart next generation internet infrastructure. Of course, this does nothing for storage problems.....
One should be able to get ~ 1Gb/sec over fiber. Conservatively, assuming 500Mb/sec real throughput, that means 12 hours in transmission time, per day. That's faster than most sorts of not-too-expensive shipping techniques.
Heck, 10 of Verizon's FiOS connections would be able to handle the bandwidth, assuming you didn't have to deal with Verizon's bottlenecks, or could somehow get the data on to their network.
Keep in mind I'm not suggesting that the infrastructure exists right now to handle this sort of thing, but it seems that the technological barriers are long in the past, and the remaining barriers are fairly simple economic ones.
Re:Big HUGE warnings - Not quite true (Score:1, Interesting)
Case room is the only real fact in here (most quality cases can only fit 4-5 drives, some go up to 6, some get as low as 2), and even then there are now several cases built specially for that kind of uses, such as Coolermaster's Stacker
The only effective thing here is that your're slaughtering your case' airflow, while this is often the only way to cool crappy cases it doesn't work well in quality cases, unless you put so much brute strength in the cooling that the airflow doesn't actually matter anymore (which is what you're doing).
Some controllers are also able to extend (or even fully replace) arrays out of the box. You usually don't find them on consumer-grade motherboards though.
newer Seagate 7200.9's (Score:2, Interesting)
750G Disks are BAHD for Databases!!! (Score:3, Interesting)
That's why I posted the following manifesto: 750G Disks are BAHD for DBS [pythian.com] a few weeks ago when these disks were released. Find out why huge disks are the bane of DBAs everywhere. My manifesto has been signed by the Oracle DBA industry's leading lights, please, use these disks for the purpose they were designed for, whatever that may be (home movies from your Canon S2 IS? I've got one of those and the on-board video compression is TERRIBLE!), and not for databases.
This public service announcement has been brought to you by Pythian Remote DBA [pythian.com].
--
Paul Vallee
President, The Pythian Group, Inc.
Re:750G Disks are BAHD for Databases!!! (Score:3, Interesting)
I read your manifesto, but still don't understand your premise. You don't adequately explain why larger sizes are inherently bad, save for the seek time issue. Given two drives with identical performance but a 2x difference in size, why is the larger worse if it's holding the exact same data?
Re:750G Disks are BAD for Databases!!! (Score:3, Interesting)
Then the DBAs wanted to horde 9gb drives because 36gb drives were too large and they wanted as many spindles as possible.
Now DBAs only want the 72gb drives because the 144s and 250s are too large and they want as many spindles as possible
I guarantee that a few years from now, we'll read about the DBAs wanting only 750gb drives because the 3tb drives are too large and they want as many spindles as possible
Surviving 350Gs ? (request for real world units) (Score:2, Interesting)
Can any Slashdotter convert 350 Gs to real world units (eg dropped 5m onto concrete) ?
Re:Get perpendicular :D (Score:3, Interesting)
For me that's not entirely true. I still have music that I like to listen to. I make sure everything is tagged with the genre, and some days I just feel like one kind of music or another. My philosophy isn't that it's overload, but that it's having a song for every situation. It's being able to hit play on "Viva Las Vegas" (ZZ Top version) as you pass the welcome sign, or queueing up "Teenage Wasteland" when my friends' kids are having a "teen" moment (that didn't help the situation any, but it was funny).
Re:Surviving 350Gs ? (request for real world units (Score:1, Interesting)
The problem is not the drop, but he change in velocity (aka - acceleration).
Dropping a pen on your desk from your hand resting on on the desk can be about 25Gs. This is about a 1" fall.
Dropping it on a magazine reduces that to about 5Gs simply because the magazine provides a cushion and extends the decelaration time by a factor of about 2.
350Gs (depending on the MASS BEING DROPPED and what it FALLS ON) may translate into about a 3" drop.
Re:High-definition MythTV box is *wonderful* (Score:3, Interesting)
GAH! Information... lacking... all... context...
HDTV streams have HORRIBLY poor compression. They encode with a constant bitrate, and use a very, very small GOP size (so you don't have to wait very long for the picture to appear when channel-surfing).
Using a better codec (eg. lavc, Xvid, x264) with a much larger keyint, varible bitrate (2-pass) encoding, etc., you can get that down to at least 1/4th the size, with really no quality loss at all. Throw some good denoising into the mix (lavc's "nr" denoiser is great, and takes almost 0 CPU time) and you'll get it significantly smaller, still, and it will look *better* than the original.
In addition, commercials are very fast, flashy, etc., and use-up much more than their fair-share of the bitrate. Editing them out will reduce the video length by 1/3rd, and reduce the overall bitrate even more (assuming VBR re-encoding).
If you don't have a very fast CPU (~3GHz/3000+) h.264/x264 is out-of-the-question. However, MPEG-4 decoding is actually FASTER than MPEG-2 decoding with a decent codec.
*And if your system is about 2GHz/2000+ or so, hardware decoding (XVMC) will use up as much or more CPU-time than decoding in software, unless you've got an AGP2x bus/card, or DMA doesn't work on your motherboard/videocard.