HDD Discussion

[Spacedye69]

Re: HDD Discussion

I win!!!!

[willawake]

Re: HDD Discussion

vodka it will steady the hand. it is the cure for all problems.

check the forum also, they touch on subjects which i never knew, like accessing the rom on board the hdd.

[Topcat]

Re: HDD Discussion

Gotta love the e-drama!!

Fascinating link Will... I've disected quite a few HDD's, but never with the intentions of repairing them... Its more fun to spin them up and play around with the spinning platters and a screwdriver!!

[willawake]

Re: HDD Discussion

you gangbangers

i wonder how much a cleanroom costs. could make buck$. does a clean room have to be tidy also? cos i am not to good at that hehehe

[arneson]

Re: HDD Discussion

Good how to on head replacement.
I've practiced this on a lot of 2.5s, bought 30 dead ones,
and was actually succesful for one.
Never thought of putting a bag over my head, that was a good tip.
My first try I opened small drive and sneazed right onto platter, that one obviously became a head doaner.

[willawake]

Re: HDD Discussion

My first try I opened small drive and sneazed right onto platter

that is the worst thing to do also when cleaning a DSLR camera sensor, sneezing in the chamber would be so bad to clean up.

[arneson]

Re: HDD Discussion

Luckily I have not been able to get any camera optics apart.
They are the most delicate mechanisms I can imagine.

[Per Hansson]

Re: HDD Discussion

Yes, you're missing something obvious. First, you commented on the fact that I used Sandra to post a benchmark of 6ms. You don't like Sandra, so I used AnalyzeDisk. AnalyzeDisk reported an access time of 12ms. But, like I've been saying, you don't bother to read my posts, how else could you miss what I did? I even posted pictures, so I've been completely upfront about this.

Haha, yes, originally you said the Raptor was slower than your Hitachi T7K250 which scored 6ms in SANDRA, I told you this was wrong and misleading for users reading this forum

So you redid the test with SPT AnalyzeDisk and came to the same conclusion as StorageReview: your Hitachi T7K250 scores ca 12ms, and if you look at the Storagereview performance database linked already countless times by me you will also see that in the exact same test the Raptor scores 8-9ms (depending on model) so we finally agree, the Raptor has an access time that is ca 3-5.1ms lower than the Hitachi T7K250 depending on models/BIOS revisions...

[Per Hansson]

Re: HDD Discussion

Here's a new question for this thread, also involving the Raptor - one that is of personal interest to me.

I'm looking for a hard drive to use as a fast and rock-solid OS/applications drive in my personal machine. I'd rather not invest too much in this for the time being, so it'll have to be a SATA over U320 or SAS.

I have, currently, two WD Caviar RE drives set up as a striping array, which give me all the sequential read speed I need (over 100MB/s). What I'm now looking for is a SATA drive, not necessarily of large capacity or high read speed, but with fantastic access time. My question is the following:

There are now two versions of the 73GB Raptor - an older, SATA I version (WD740GD) and a newer, SATA II and bridge-chip free version (WD740ADFD).

Price for the newer SATA II version appears to be about $30 higher - which I'm not sure is justified - virtually all benchmarks I've seen show the two drives being almost identical in terms of low-level benchmark scores. In certain tests, the older version would actually marginally outperform the newer, and viceversa in other tests.

Taking the price difference into consideration, which of the two drives would you recommend?

This is difficult to answer for someone else IMO

I feel very limited by my harddrive, finding myself oftenly waiting for it, making my system feel unresponsive.

Therefore I have no problem to prioritize the harddrive in my system a little more than normal users do, because even if the difference is only a few percent I atleast know that I can not in a financially defendable way get anything that is even faster than the latest Raptors. That is; for the way I use my computer and expect it to perform...

I went from a 74GB Raptor, WD740GD with the latest firmware that increased performance ca 10% compared to the older WD740GD, to the new WD1500ADFD Raptor with 150GB capacity. I can't say I really "feel" the difference between them, but I know it is there and that is enough for me, plus I felt the added disk space was also needed...

Now this probably did not make you very much wiser on your choice but it's all the "advice" I can offer...

[Per Hansson]

Re: HDD Discussion

I'm sorry to keep on in this thread but I reread it and found something highly amusing, Zorros Hitachi T7K250 is indeed listed in the article tiresias originally linked to, and with an access time of 13.10ms, exactly what also Storagereview found out... (yes, it is the 250GB SATA version but if anything that should be even quicker than Zorros 160GB IDE version of the drive.)

The reason I did not initially see this was that Zorro did not at first tell me exactly what drive he had, so I did not bother to read the article tiresias linked, thinking Zorros drive will not be in it anyway...

I don't want to get stuck on this issue too long - but I really have to disagree with you on that point.

Here, for example, http://tweakers.net/benchdb/test/31 you can see the access times as measured for hundreds of hard disks on various controllers, from the fastest SCSI drives to the most basic IDE disks. See where the WD Raptor stands, compared to the 7200rpm ATA drives (including Hitachi's models) - it really is considerably faster.

There aren't any Hitachi 160GB ATA scores anywhere on that site. They list OLDER model Hitachi ATA drives that were still under the IBM designations, and that's it. My RECENTLY made Hitachi still has a faster access time than every SATA Raptor listed on that site by almost a full ms. You can disagree with me all you like, you're still wrong, and linking to benchmarks for a drive that's not mine proves nothing. The site does show you wrong on your claims regarding Sequential Read/Writes. The Raptor is significantly faster than the Hitachi, as I'd said.

[arneson]

Re: HDD Discussion

I say you said read this post, that, I'm hurt you're pissed, slam, flame..
This is old.

[Tom41]

Re: HDD Discussion

I never knew about needing a 100% 'clean' room to open up HDDs - I once opened up a really old 40MB HDD (yes, THAT old) and had a look inside. Although I took every care not to touch or even breath on the platters, after closing it up again the drive would not read anything - it wouldn't even format!

I've disected quite a few HDD's, but never with the intentions of repairing them... Its more fun to spin them up and play around with the spinning platters and a screwdriver!!

Hmm, I decided the only use for the 40MB HDD after opening it up was to do a 'low level format' on it... with a screwdriver! Check out the pic - clearly aluminum platters, not glass. (Sorry about the low quality, had to use a cheap webcam)

[arneson]

Re: HDD Discussion

Could make a little tiny pottery wheel out of it, for little tiny pots.

[kc8adu]

Re: HDD Discussion

they spin too fast for that.
you can use a 10k-15k as a fan with the cover off.
they move a lot of air for being flat platters!

[arneson]

Re: HDD Discussion

If I had one of these hanging off my car mirror I'd want it to be spinning. lol

[projectmayhem]

Re: HDD Discussion

with all this talk about raid and disk performance, i didnt see anyone mention - excuse me if im wrong - anything about controller performance. a cheap raid controller or onboard raid is going to have its performance very much dependent on the machines CPU power as the controller cant offload the striping overhead during I/O. the controller uses the CPU for that. if you have a CPU hungry program or game, its going to bottleneck between the games instructions for execution and disk I/O for the raid 0 set. if you want to do a decent benchmark on raid arrays, you need a raid controller with its own onboard CPU, usually an Intel i960. just disable the cache features and test away.

as for disk failures at the beginning of the thread, no one mentioned either that your pc has to be properly grounded. if its not grounded, bad sectors appear instantly. i have a daimondmax plus 8 that worked perfect until i gave it to someone. shes not abusive and doesnt even really use her pc. i formatted and reinstalled, all was good, brought it over and it wouldnt boot xp. somehow it came to me very quickly when i thought about everything that could go wrong. no/bad ground causes a static voltage buildup in the chassis of your pc and hdd. because the voltages used for disk access are so minute, any voltage bias will screw it all up. and what made it worse was the pc was on carpet. after installing a ac grounding adapter, ive had no complaints. so yea, check your ground if your hdd is dying prematurely. also google a program called hdd regenerator. it can fix weak sectors. its not free, but you can find it on torrent if you really need it bad.

[gonzo0815]

Re: HDD Discussion

Well, normaly the whole case will be grounded by the PSU, at least if it has the usuall 3 pin plug and your installation is ok.
Only if you make a silent box or something made of rubber you should take some grounding meassures.
But remeber, there are some -quite old- IBM models out there, which should be not grounded. All holes and screws are isolated.

Regarding the controler issue raised, i agree absolutely , that this is a major factor, but unfortunately there aren`t mutch SOHO raid controlers out there with a controler. But on the other side, any AMD 64c cpu will have enough cpu power to not bottleneck the hdd. probably same for Intel. Not to forget, if the SATA rails are embeded to the chipset, the data transfer and bandwith are far bettter.

[Per Hansson]

Re: HDD Discussion

gonzo; do you mean there would be grounding problems if the HDD was suspended (not grounded by chassi) but the case was still properly grounded?

I kind of doubt that since it still has two grounding cables from the molex connector... Could you please enlighten me?

[gonzo0815]

Re: HDD Discussion

Well, what i wanted to say, is that not all HDD cases are grounded from the pcb`s molex conectors and that there could be problems like static voltage buildup if those drives are mounted insulated. Yes that is right. And there are some (probably older) IBM HDD`s out there, which has intensionally isolated cases and mounting holes. Those drives should not be grounded.
But in all other cases, neither some grounding is neccesary nor recomended, as long as no problems are encountered, as the normal pc case is already grounded (and the screwed on hdd case obviousely too) and most hdds are grounded by the pcb mounting screws via the molex ground.
So to make it simple, all that can be cheked by visual inspection of the hdd in question, before any grounding meassure will be taken.

[arneson]

Re: HDD Discussion

10 years ago all drives, optical and hard, had copper foil strips placed between them and the case mount rails.
This was added grounding for static or EMI I assume.