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."
The justification for more space (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The justification for more space (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The justification for more space (Score:3, Funny)
Re:The justification for more space (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The justification for more space (Score:2, Funny)
Re:The justification for more space (Score:5, Funny)
No no....no no. Well. No. Absolutely not. Porn Music no. Porn AND Music, yes.
Re:The justification for more space (Score:5, Funny)
Do you mean music from porn movies, or audio porn? The latter is good to work out to; somehow, I find I don't get tired nearly as fast when I'm turned on.
Re:The justification for more space (Score:3, Funny)
Re:The justification for more space (Score:3, Funny)
Scrambling? (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:Scrambling? (Score:5, Interesting)
And, do firewire enclosures support them?
Not just RAID controllers... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Scrambling? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Scrambling? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Scrambling? (Score:2)
Plus a 3rd for near-line backup... and a 4th for a hot-spare...
=)
Get perpendicular :D (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/research/recording_
Watch out for the superparamagnetic effect though.
Re:Get perpendicular :D (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Get perpendicular :D (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
Re:Get perpendicular :D (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Get perpendicular :D (Score:5, Insightful)
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: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'
Re:Get perpendicular :D (Score:2)
Re:Get perpendicular :D (Score:2)
Soem examples for slogans that just don't work in Germany:
RWE Group: One Group, Multi Utilities - only e
Whoah (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow, thought those days were gone.
Re:Whoah (Score:5, Informative)
Myth boxes and the like (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
why not? (Score:2)
Um...preferred by whom? I work in media and I can tell you, space is preferred, period. Nobody cares about the power draw of one more drive or the whirling of another disk.
Of course, if you're working with a lot of video media, you're probably not storing it locally, anyway. In fact, we don't even store our audio locally.
Re:why not? (Score:2)
"Myth boxes and the like" (Score:2)
Re:Myth boxes and the like (Score:2)
Re:Myth boxes and the like (Score:2)
I have five Seagates in my workstation here, 1x 15kRPM and 4x 7.2kRPM, and the sound really isn't objectionable.
I have one single 10k RPM drive in my HTPC, and it's not a problem, and wouldn't mind adding more. My refrigerator and video projector are both louder.
Re:Myth boxes and the like (Score:2)
Actually, I'd say the BEST solution is to put a box with minimal or no drive capacity in the living room, and put in on a home network that connects to an arbitrarily large network storage box in the other room. But if that's not feasible for whatever reason, a single large disk in the media PC itself is the next-best solution.
Re:Myth boxes and the like (Score:3, Insightful)
I am a photographer. raw photos I take are easily 100MB. In a photoshoot i easily take 50 to
Re:Myth boxes and the like (Score:5, Funny)
Big HUGE warnings (Score:2, Funny)
2. 7 100 Gb disks (that would cost less than USD 430 [techreport.com]) will be at least 7 times more reliable than the 7200.10 with possibile similar performances.
Re:Big HUGE warnings (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Big HUGE warnings (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Big HUGE warnings - Not quite true (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Big HUGE warnings - Not quite true (Score:2)
Re:Big HUGE warnings - Not quite true (Score:2)
I just set up a 4x400GB drive array because Best Buy had the Seagates on sale, and then bought an old PCI-X 3Ware Escalade and put it in a 64bit / 66MHz PCI slot, giving me a pretty fast 1.2TB volume.
Re:Big HUGE warnings - Not quite true (Score:2)
Re:Big HUGE warnings - Not quite true (Score:3, Informative)
Not only that, but you NEED a hot spare. If you have a RAID made up of a bunch of the same drive, and one fails, it should be a warning sign to you. The other drives are substantially the same as that one, and they should now be considered likely to fail, unless it failed WELL within the MTBF window.
Re:Big HUGE warnings - Not quite true (Score:5, Informative)
RAIDing 7 or 8 drives would be quite a task, while doing 2-4 drives is relatively easy.
For those who don't see the difference: Most boxes don't have controller capacity for more than four drives (two PATA channels and two SATA channels) and seven or eight drives will also strain your PSU and your cooling capacity. Might be hard to fit in your case, too.
Of course, once you solve those problems, actually setting up the RAID is no different whether you have three drives or 30. A little more typing, maybe.
My file server has six disks in it, BTW, so I've worked through all of this. I can easily add a seventh without any trouble. An eighth would require a new controller card. I'm not sure how many drives I can add before my 550W PSU starts to have trouble. My cooling solution is low-tech, loud and very effective: The side of the case is off and I have a 30-inch box fan (the kind you mount in a window to cool your house) blowing into it.
One nifty trick I discovered is that if you slice all of your disks up into many small partitions, then create many RAID-5 arrays (using partition 1 on each disk to create the first array, etc.), then use LVM to bind all the arrays together you can add additional disks and rebuild the arrays without having to find some way to back up all of the data first.
I just added a 500GB drive to my system and I'm in the process of changing all of my four-disk RAID-5 arrays to five-disk RAID-5 arrays. The process works like this:
This assumes Linux, obviously, is a bit tedious and requires that your LVM volume have enough free space so you can drop an array out of it. It's a whole lot easier than trying to figure out how to back up a TB+ of data so that you can rebuild your array, though. In my case, there's an additional step right after step four -- because my new drive is SATA and Linux doesn't support more than 15 partitions on an SATA drive, I'm moving from using 20GB partitions to 40GB partitions. So after I kill each pair of four-disk arrays, I repartition the drive to merge the partitions.
Let me tell you... repartitioning all of the disks holding my data made me more than a little nervous at first :-) I kept backups of the partition tables, just in case, but it actually worked just fine. Next time, though, I think I'll just create a single partition and use LVM to chop it into pieces which I can RAID together. So I'll have LVM over RAID over LVM. Sounds weird, but it makes a lot of practical sense.
Re:Big HUGE warnings - Not quite true (Score:3, Informative)
Any modern nForce4-based motherboard handles raid arrays on 4 SATA drives, any additional chip is gravy (my 1 year old DFI handles 4 form the nForce plus 4 from a Promise chip)
This is perhaps the case. I don't use modern motherboards and processors for home file servers. Old stuff works fine -- but suffers from the drive controller capacity limitations.
Seven or eight drives won't strain a PSU (unless it's a cheap no-brand piece of crap)
My experience is different. I had a decent (but non-server) 3
Re:Big HUGE warnings (Score:2)
Re:Big HUGE warnings (Score:3, Informative)
I just wish they made high-quality cases with that many drive bays, but I haven't found any for some reason.
Re:Big HUGE warnings (Score:5, Informative)
if you've got 7 drives and I've got 1, you're seven times more likely to lose a drive than
I am.
Granted, you only lose 1/7th if your drive fails, and I lose all of it, but since we're both
making backups (you ARE making backups, right?), you're paying 7 times the space, electricity,
heat, and noise costs for less reliable storage than I am. Assuming that we both run out systems
long enough for drives to fail, you're also paying 7 times as much of your time replacing drives
than I am.
What sense does that make?
Bad math.. (Score:5, Informative)
I am.
Let's say each drive has a 20% chance of failing. So if you have seven of them, do you have a 140% chance of one failing? Of course not. What you really have is 80%^7 percent chance of them all remaining OK. 80%^7 = 21%. Thus you have around a 79% chance of failure with 7 drives (if they all have 20% failure rate).
Your point still stands - but I noticed pretty much all of the replies to this guy used the same bad math.
Re:Bad math.. (Score:2)
Re:Bad math.. (Score:3, Informative)
7 times as many failures (over a large number of samples) is not the same as 7 times the chance to have a failure.
Re:Bad math.. (Score:2)
Except that your math only stands if you're calculating the loss of the entire drive (or drive set) as opposed to any data loss. The chance of data loss (of any kind) is greater with 7 drives than it is with a single drive. The difference is merely how much data is lost. Which is of little comfort if the drive that fails is the "really important" one.
You're still playing Russian Roulette, but this time you're aiming at various body p
I'm afraid you've misunderstood my post. (Score:2)
Re:Bad math.. (Score:5, Informative)
IF you have a 20% failure rate.
It cheats somewhat to use that as an example, however, because with the real probabilities involved, you approach a linear trend with the number of drives.
Let's try an MBTF of 50k hours. That gives us a 0.002% chance of failure per hour. Take 0.99998 to the seventh, and we get 0.9998600084... Or "seven times as likely", accurate to better than one part in a thousand.
Though, I will admit doubt that the GP explicitly took that into consideration in his statement.
Why do airplanes only have 2 engines? (Score:3, Informative)
Having 7 drives increases your risk of failure by a factor of seven. Unless you mirror every drive, but then, you now have 14 disks v 2...
Re:Why do airplanes only have 2 engines? (Score:2)
A plane will have multiple engines because it needs additional thrust, and that's often more efficiently gained by hanging on extra engines rather than just increasing the power of a single one.
Re:Why do airplanes only have 2 engines? (Score:2)
You aren't serious, are you? ETOPS ("engines turn or passengers swim") standards are only met by certain of the newest twin-engine airplane designs. Historically four-engined airplanes were allowed to go much further away from diversion airports than two-engined airplanes.
Re:Big HUGE warnings (Score:2)
And only if you discount the fact that, while it is 7 times as likely to fails at once, it is also 7 times more likely to fail at all.
Also, 7 x 100 is less then 750. If you want some back up in place you will need the the extra controller and hardware to configure it into a RAID, which, even if in software mode, still take times to set up.
Lastly, I doublt 7 100 gig drives can consu
Re:Big HUGE warnings (Score:2)
-matthew
Re:Big HUGE warnings (Score:2)
Re:Big HUGE warnings (Score:2)
If you fill the disk(s), the 750 GB one will have the arms and platters move 7 times more that each single 100 Gb disk.
Even if one of the 7 breaks, you'll loose only a mere 14% of the data.
My box fits 10 disks because I like to play it safe and some 7 times more heat (I blow away) is worth the increase in reliability.
And yes, mine was a joke.
Re:Big HUGE warnings (Score:2)
And then... how are you storing the data? Having the data split up among many different drives causes usability issues where you must make a conscious decision where to put your data each time you save a file. Software is hor
Re:Big HUGE warnings (Score:2)
Re:Big HUGE warnings (Score:2, Funny)
Uh... no (Score:3, Insightful)
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:Uh... no (Score:2)
only 187 million times cheaper per bit (Score:5, Funny)
Price I don't know, definitely no less than $5000 of 1972 dollars. That's about 78 bits per dollar.
This new disk is about 14634146341.463414634146341463415 bits per dollar that's an improvement of about 187 million times .
but wait those old dolalrs were at least 4 times more studly than today's, so that's about 600 million times better over the last 34 years. An annual rate of about 183% !
Re:only 187 million times cheaper per bit (Score:5, Informative)
The following prices are estimates based on www.pricescan.com [pricescan.com]. There could be as much as +/- 10% variation in prices.
PATA drive prices
120GB $64 - $0.53/GB
160GB $70 - $0.44/GB
200GB $75 - $0.38/GB
250GB $80 - $0.32/GB
300GB $105 - $0.35/GB
400GB $195 - $0.49/GB
500GB $260 - $0.52/GB
750GB $490 - $0.65/GB
SATA Drive prices ($/GB)
120GB $68 - $0.57/GB
160GB $65 - $0.41/GB
200GB $76 - $0.38/GB
250GB $80 - $0.32/GB
300GB $105 - $0.35/GB
400GB $175 - $0.44/GB
500GB $250 - $0.50/GB
750GB $434 - $0.58/GB
Well... (Score:2)
Re:Well... (Score:2)
I have two 80GB 7200 RPM disks in a RAID 0 and yes, it's dramatically faster. I did some benchmarks (we all know what those are worth, but...) and I gained about 90% speed by adding the second drive.
Unfortunately, I don't have any way to back up 150GB (actual usable space) and if I lose one drive, I lose everything...
I'm thinking the best idea for the way I use my system is to get like five drives and make four of them into a RAID 5, using the last one as a scratch volume for photoshop and such, unti
Re:Well... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
its funny... (Score:3, Funny)
customer: "my drive failed...i would like it replaced"
company: "sure..here is your new one!"
customer: "uhhh...what happened to my data?"
Re:its funny... (Score:2, Funny)
BOFH: "You will have to re-enter it all manually. And remember that hard drives store data in binary, so you will have to use only the 0 and 1 keys."
Big Big Drives are great...but backup is a problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Big Big Drives are great...but backup is a prob (Score:3, Informative)
3x750 in RAID-5 would net you about 1.3TiB of storage and would allow upto one drive to completely die without losing data. If you're more paranoid you could use 4x750 and have upto two drives die.
The RAID access will be automatic so effectively you're always backing data up.
Tom
Urgggg. My brain is melting from the BS (Score:3, Insightful)
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 po
Re:Big Big Drives are great...but backup is a prob (Score:3, Informative)
Put it in a USB adapter and use rysync.
Quick, easy, cheap.
Re:Big Big Drives are great...but backup is a prob (Score:3, Informative)
Yes they are expensive, but that is because people don't backup so the volumes are to small. Chicken and egg situtuation really. Only something like two million DLT drives of all types have ever shipped. In the same period it is probably more like two billion hard drives that have shipped. Hard driv
Magneto (Score:2, Funny)
You suppose this drive uses technology similar to that Magneto uses to achieve all of his Mutant feats?
750 GB (Score:2, Funny)
The real reason why this drive is great (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:The real reason why this drive is great (Score:4, Informative)
1. Preview
2. Go into your prefs [slashdot.org] and change Comment Post Mode to 'Plain Old Text'.
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!
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
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...
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 tran
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 ab
Re:Now all I need...is a backup perhaps? (Score:5, Funny)
Seriously, there is no reason whatsoever for anyone to lose any data. Even if it means forking over the money for a tape backup and tapes, if you lose any data due to a drive failure you have no one to blame but yourself. If it's important, build a RAID. If its critical, build a RAID with some kind of tape or other backup.
Yeah, I know, this is "Well, no shit, Sherlock" territory, but it always irks me when someone talks about losing data because there's no real need for losing any data, particularly if it's important.
Of course, if getting that data back is a simple task of downloading (again) from alt.binaries.multimedia.erotica, that's a different situation.
Re:Now all I need...is a backup perhaps? (Score:5, Insightful)
Psst... Money is a reason.
Lame excuse. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Now all I need...is a backup perhaps? (Score:3, Insightful)
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:Now all I need...is a backup perhaps? (Score:2)
Re:Now all I need...is a backup perhaps? (Score:2)
Re:Now all I need...is a backup perhaps? (Score:4, Insightful)
Not only won't RAID save you from a "rm -rf
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:That's a lot of DVDs (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:That's a lot of DVDs (Score:2)
You're on the right track with the "buy another hard drive" suggestion, except that you want to put it in a removable cage and store it in a safe deposit box at the bank. (And preferably get two backup discs, so that you can be copying to one while the other is safe in the vault.)
Re:That's a lot of DVDs (Score:3, Funny)
You're right. Its so important to have offsite backups for reliability.
Think about it. If you're diligent about it, and take offsite backups from your house to your work or neighbors or whatnot, when you're house burns down you can still have all of your MP3s, TV shows, and everything!
The bitch is that you forgot to do redundancy and offsite backups of y
Re:FIVE WORDS : ANIME, MUSIC, PORN, GAMES, MOVIES (Score:2)
Hey! Who are you, and how do you know what's on my hard drive?