Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Review of Seagate's 750Gb Hard Drive 414

Posted by Zonk from the raid-array-in-a-box dept.
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."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Review of Seagate's 750Gb Hard Drive More

Review of Seagate's 750Gb Hard Drive

Comments Filter:

  • The justification for more space (Score:5, Funny)

    by Dude McDude ( 938516 ) on Tuesday May 30, 2006 @11:10AM (#15428321)
    One word: PORN

  • Scrambling? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by _Hellfire_ ( 170113 ) on Tuesday May 30, 2006 @11:11AM (#15428328)
    "...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 :(

    • Re:Scrambling? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by ericdano ( 113424 ) on Tuesday May 30, 2006 @11:30AM (#15428456) Homepage
      Which bring up the question, do existing RAID controllers support this drive?

      And, do firewire enclosures support them?

      • Not just RAID controllers... (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        ...but how do these 300MB/s SATA NCQ drives actually fare against U160/U320 SCSI drives for sustained thruput in something like a database server that normally benefits from the multithreaded i/o capability of SCSI? The "300MB/s" is pretty close to the "U320" rating of peak data xfer rate, but as we all know, the absolute very best and fastest disks themselves can generally only stream a continuous ~ 80MB/s due to mechanical limits of the hard drive regardless of the electrical interface, and most commodit

      • Re:Scrambling? (Score:5, Informative)

        by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Tuesday May 30, 2006 @12:03PM (#15428708) Homepage Journal
        Any firewire bridge that has the right interface to speak to the drive should be able to talk to it just fine. This isn't the old dark days of DOS where you needed extender software just to talk to fancy new drives. Since drives use logical geometry to talk to the host adapter, this just isn't an issue any more.

      • Re:Scrambling? (Score:5, Informative)

        by Fweeky ( 41046 ) on Tuesday May 30, 2006 @12:03PM (#15428710) Homepage
        Anything supporting LBA48 should handle it just fine, although we're rapidly approaching the 2TB limit many controllers have on a single disk/array. LBA48 supports drives up to 128PB (512 byte blocks * 2^48), but of course we're still in a largely 32bit world, so it's more like 512*2^32 unless you're careful.
    • 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 :(

      Plus a 3rd for near-line backup... and a 4th for a hot-spare...

      =)

  • Get perpendicular :D (Score:5, Informative)

    by LiquidCoooled ( 634315 ) on Tuesday May 30, 2006 @11:13AM (#15428341) Homepage Journal

    http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/research/recording_h ead/pr/PerpendicularAnimation.html [hitachigst.com]

    Watch out for the superparamagnetic effect though.

    • Re:Get perpendicular :D (Score:5, Insightful)

      by edzillion ( 842353 ) on Tuesday May 30, 2006 @11:41AM (#15428532)
      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.

      • Re:Get perpendicular :D (Score:5, Insightful)

        by WuphonsReach ( 684551 ) on Tuesday May 30, 2006 @12:13PM (#15428792)
        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.

      • 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?

      • Re:Get perpendicular :D (Score:5, Insightful)

        by hackstraw ( 262471 ) * on Tuesday May 30, 2006 @01:06PM (#15429207)
        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:Get perpendicular :D (Score:3, Interesting)

        by kettch ( 40676 )
        I have noticed that the more music I have ripped on my pc the less I listen to each song

        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'

  • Whoah (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MobileTatsu-NJG ( 946591 ) on Tuesday May 30, 2006 @11:13AM (#15428344)
    "Throw in an industry-leading five year warranty..."

    Wow, thought those days were gone.

    • Re:Whoah (Score:5, Informative)

      by Martin Blank ( 154261 ) on Tuesday May 30, 2006 @11:29AM (#15428448) Homepage Journal
      You just have to look for them a bit. I just picked up a 300GB Maxtor SATA-2 with 16MB cache and NCQ that has a 5-year warranty, and it only cost me about $6 more than the 3-year warranty version with identical specs. Other companies may also offer them. (Of course, Maxtor is now a part of Seagate.)

  • Myth boxes and the like (Score:5, Insightful)

    by debest ( 471937 ) on Tuesday May 30, 2006 @11:16AM (#15428364)
    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!
    • Since these devices are preferably low noise, low power, and small in size...



      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.
    • In addition to flat out larger hard drive storage sizes, using the perpendicular method will also allow physically smaller hard drives of decent storage ability. The potential benefit to laptops, mp3 players and all other manner of portable devices is quite real.
    • The Seagates aren't very loud, I think their noise is negligible except for the fussiest people, and improving case accoustics helps a lot more than reducing the number of drives.

      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.
    • 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.

      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.
    • 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 imagin
  • 1. The more data you pack in a volume, the higher the risk for data loss due to mechanical breaks.
    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.

    • 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 (Score:2, Insightful)

      by muhgcee ( 188154 ) *
      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 (Score:5, Insightful)

      by drhamad ( 868567 ) on Tuesday May 30, 2006 @11:23AM (#15428405)
      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.
      • RAIDing 7 or 8 drives would be quite a task, while doing 2-4 drives is relatively easy.
        On the other hand, more drives would give better performance and capacity, since you could use fancier RAID levels (e.g. 5 instead of 1).
        • RAID 5 isn't necessarily faster, but it's a lot better for data redundancy, so you can keep going when a drive fails. I wouldn't bother with RAID 0 unless you have a heavy backup system (like 0+1), and mirroring is a bit inefficient.

          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.
        • RAID 5 is typically pretty slow on writes, but about as fast as a RAID 0 on reads. As you likely know, it also sacrifices one drive's worth of space for parity information regardless of the number of drives in the stripe. Anyway if you are running a multiuser environment with a bunch of ordinary users, most of whom are reading more than writing, a RAID 5 makes sense. If you have a database with lots of reads and few writes, likewise. If you are doing video, where you are reading in a lot of data, and writin

      • Re:Big HUGE warnings - Not quite true (Score:5, Informative)

        by swillden ( 191260 ) * <shawn-ds@willden.org> on Tuesday May 30, 2006 @12:06PM (#15428725) Journal

        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:

        1. Use pvmove to migrate all of the data off of an existing four-disk array.
        2. Use vgreduce to remove the now-unused array from the volume group.
        3. Use pvremove to remove the LVM superblock from the array.
        4. Use mdadm to stop the array and clear the md superblocks on the partitions.
        5. Use mdadm to construct a new five-disk array from the four partitions that made up the old array, plus a fifth partition from the new disk.
        6. Use pvcreate to add an LVM superblock to the array.
        7. Use vgextend to add the array into the volume group.
        8. Go back to step 1 with the next four-disk array, until they've all been converted.

        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.

    • How will having lots of smaller disks be more reliable? If they mirror each other, yes, but if they are striped, they'll be a lot less reliable. Plus who has room (and power) in their case for 7 drives? Datacenters, sure, but not home users.

      • Re:Big HUGE warnings (Score:3, Informative)

        by mrchaotica ( 681592 ) *
        Plus who has room (and power) in their case for 7 drives? Datacenters, sure, but not home users.
        I've seen cheap ($30) mid-tower cases that had about 8 internal 3.5" drive bays -- they just had the mounting rails go the entire height of the case. Combine that with a decent power supply and you're set.

        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)

      by Dan Ost ( 415913 ) on Tuesday May 30, 2006 @11:24AM (#15428413)
      No, this isn't true. If the failure rate of drives is constant (pretty close to reality), then
      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)

        by JMZero ( 449047 ) on Tuesday May 30, 2006 @11:31AM (#15428461) Homepage
        If you've got 7 drives and I've got 1, you're seven times more likely to lose a drive than
        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.
        • Uh, you're still 7 times more likely to lose a drive.

          • Re:Bad math.. (Score:3, Informative)

            by enrevanche ( 953125 )
            Not true, if you flip a coin 3 times are you 3 times as likely to get a tail. i.e. do you have a 150% chance of getting at least one tail? no you have 1 - 0.5^3 = 1 - 0.125 = 87.5% chance. There is 12.5% chance that you would get no tails. With drive failure it works the same way, you have a chance at no failures and also a chance of multiple failures.

            7 times as many failures (over a large number of samples) is not the same as 7 times the chance to have a failure.

        • I noticed pretty much all of the replies to this guy used the same bad math

          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
          • But I don't think I can make it any clearer. Maybe I'll try: Your chance of losing one or more of the drives is around 79% if you have 7 drives (and they each fail at a rate of 20%). That's definitely more than the rate of 1 drive - but it's not nearly 7 times the rate (which would be 140%).

        • Re:Bad math.. (Score:5, Informative)

          by pla ( 258480 ) on Tuesday May 30, 2006 @12:01PM (#15428688) Journal
          Thus you have around a 79% chance of failure with 7 drives (if they all have 20% failure rate).

          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. ;-)
    • Because with only 2, there is *less* risk of engine failure.

      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...
      • Ummm, WTF are you talking about? The phrase "Why do airplanes only have 2 engines?" doesn't make a bit of sense. SOME planes have 2 engines. Plenty have just 1. Some have 4. Some have even had 8 of them. And towed gliders don't have any (though they're not technically considered an airplane).

        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.
      • Because with only 2, there is *less* risk of engine failure.

        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.

    • Only if you assume the new drive, with new technology, is still just as reliable as those older drive in smaller sizes.

      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
    • 7 times more reliable? Seems awefully simplistic to me. Most people are going to want to put those drives in an array. With RAID 5 (to get the performance you talk about) you'd have 6 disks worth of space and could only afford 1 drive failure. How do you get 7 times more reliable out of that? It is no more reliable than 2 mirrored 750GB disks. Besides, what does your average user put 7 drives in?

      -matthew
      • With RAID 5 and 7 drives you would probably want to stripe across 6 drives, giving 500 GB useable space and keep 1 hot spare. The performance of a 6-drive RAID with one failed drive would be terrible, so you need to have a spare drive to rebuild your RAID as quickly as possible.
    • OK. OK.
      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.
      • You'd better make sure that you have an excellent power supply and superb cooling if you're running that many drives on a computer. High heat and spotty power run havoc an a hard drive's life expectancy. I really don't see 10 smallish disks being any more reliable than 1 big one.

        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

  • Uh... no (Score:3, Insightful)

    by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Tuesday May 30, 2006 @11:19AM (#15428382)
    "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.

    • Hot and bothered is right. If you look at the specs, this thing uses more power and most likely gets hotter than its predecessors. I'm starting to care about power consumption with processors, and it seems only reasonable that be applied to other devices like drives and video cards as well. The largest hard drive in my home is 160gb right now. I could use a 700GB disk, but I'd rather have a drive that uses less power at say 300GB.

  • only 187 million times cheaper per bit (Score:5, Funny)

    by Ancient_Hacker ( 751168 ) on Tuesday May 30, 2006 @11:25AM (#15428418)
    $413 sounds a bit pricey, but then I thought back to my fiurst disk srive, a DEC DF-32. Only 32,768 12-bit words!

    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)

      by WuphonsReach ( 684551 ) on Tuesday May 30, 2006 @01:01PM (#15429169)
      $413 sounds pricey until, as you noted, you do the math for the $/GB amount. For being a leading-edge drive, the price per GB is rather competitive.

      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

  • Technically, I already have 830gb of storage, but it consists of a 500gb Raid0 array, a 200gb backup drive and an 80gb external. Personally, I would say to go out and buy two 400gb drives and put them in Raid0. In my experience, it is much faster than a single drive. My boot time is under 20 seconds easy after the CMOS finishes loading.

    • 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)

      by CharlieHedlin ( 102121 ) on Tuesday May 30, 2006 @11:55AM (#15428642)
      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.

  • its funny... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Connie_Lingus ( 317691 ) on Tuesday May 30, 2006 @11:37AM (#15428509) Homepage
    ..but those 5-year warrenties don't really help you much if you FORGET THE BACKUP THE FRIGGING DRIVE!

    customer: "my drive failed...i would like it replaced"

    company: "sure..here is your new one!"

    customer: "uhhh...what happened to my data?"
    • customer: "uhhh...what happened to my data?"

      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."
  • 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.
    • RAID-5 [or 6]. If you're running something where you have 750GB of information chances are you can justify spending 2-3K on reliable storage.

      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
      • 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 po
    • Buy 2 drives, use the second one for backup.

      Put it in a USB adapter and use rysync.
      Quick, easy, cheap.
    • How about a DLT-S4 tape then. They hold 800GB of data native. At no time to the best of my knowledge in the last 10 years has the largest hard drive ever held more than the largest tape. Before that I don't know.

      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)

    by OYAHHH ( 322809 ) *
    Do,

    You suppose this drive uses technology similar to that Magneto uses to achieve all of his Mutant feats?

  • 750 GB (Score:2, Funny)

    by Mister Jimm ( 976730 )
    Men are like gas, they fill the space available. -- Red Green
  • while buying this product doesn't make much sense economically (unless you consider the cost per "bay" in your server and you overpaid your server), there is one reason this drive is great for the rest of us since it came out on the retail market about 2-3 weeks ago the price of almost all the other drives dropped significantly here are the price per GB at my fav wholesaler (eprom.com) 40gb 1.2$CAD/gb 80gb 0.675$CAD/gb 120gb 0.608$CAD/gb 160gb 0.481$CAD/gb 200gb 0.425$CAD/gb 250gb 0.356$CAD/gb 300gb 0.

  • High-definition MythTV box is *wonderful* (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Yeechang Lee ( 3429 ) on Tuesday May 30, 2006 @12:20PM (#15428857)
    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.

    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!

    • Analog channels such as TCM generate about 2900MB/hour due to the extra noise.

      GAH! Information... lacking... all... context...

      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 . . .

      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)

    by Dr. Zowie ( 109983 ) <slashdot@defores t . org> on Tuesday May 30, 2006 @12:23PM (#15428874)
    Solar scientific data is growing too large to handle. The SOHO [nasa.gov] data are almost small enough to ship around by internet (the whole dataset is something like 20-30 TB for 10 years of operation), though data mining and such are starting to fall back on SneakerNet as the SDAC [nasa.gov] is shipping around terabyte lunchbox drives as their preferred method of bulk data export.

    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...

     
    • How far are you distributing this data? Is it going places Internet2 doesn't go? Is it prohibitively expensive to hop on to Internet2, given the budgets of these sorts of projects?

      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)

    by vallee ( 2192 ) on Tuesday May 30, 2006 @01:42PM (#15429509)
    I can tell from the tone of this review that a lot of pointy-haired purchasing managers are going to be dying to use these for enterprise database applications. I can feel the tense discussions coming on strong now.

    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.
    • Find out why huge disks are the bane of DBAs everywhere.

      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?

    • I remember when DBAs were screaming that they only wanted 1 and 2gb disks and as many spindles as possible, and at that time, it was the 9gb SCSI drives that were BAD because they we too big and people wanted more spindles

      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

Slashdot Top Deals

A morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable. -- Thomas Jefferson

Close