The beauty of modern hard drives

[dood]

This is, by far, the fastest mechanical HD I've ever had the pleasure of using. I'd say "own", but it's in my work PC. WDC7501AALS.

Never thought I'd see a mechanical drive approach SATA-II limits...

Makes Vistard almost bearable over my old WD 80gb primary...

[washu]

Re: The beauty of modern hard drives

That's not bad for a mechanical drive, but it's not even pushing SATA-I speeds, let alone SATA-II

SATA-I: 150 MB/sec
SATA-II: 300 MB/sec

[Per Hansson]

Re: The beauty of modern hard drives

It's not a bad HDD but not even close to SATA-1 limits
And the sustained transfer rate is not so important for windows, access time is, for small files...

Most current decent SSD drives are already at the limit of SATA-II at 260MB read... And on them access time is below 0.1ms...

This is a single WD VelociRaptor on a LSI 8704ELP Raidcard...

[Wizard]

Re: The beauty of modern hard drives

Correct. To jump up raptor/velocitor (sp?) from fastest SATA (hitachi 1TB IIRC) is not very much and cost you dearly. The SATA WD 10K drives is always $1/GB. OUCH!!

Stick with 7200rpm current generation SATA II drives. They do well. Hitachi do better on multiple files accesses.

SSD is still north of $2/GB. So no taker for me yet. 140 CDN for a 30GB Indilinx based SSD. Forget it!

PS: You are advised to take your time and take a coffee/cola/water, whatever, and 30 minutes to read though this linky:

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/sho...spx?i=3531&p=1
Recent article on updated SSD drives as of now:
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3631

Taking a good SSD is important still. There are too much poor SSD out there and outdated ones and lot of them is not indilinx based and intel recently came out with 2nd generation SSD that is significently cheaper but I still find this expensive.

Cheers, Wizard

[KeriJane]

Re: The beauty of modern hard drives

Hello.

I've got a similar model, the WD1001FALS over here in my Mac Pro.

It's really fast. I did a test on it once as you did.

It seems to be holding up well too.
It is indeed a wonderful example of modern Hard Drive Technology.

It'll be time to get 3 more of them soon,
Keri

[ratdude747]

Re: The beauty of modern hard drives

none for me. too poor .my maxtor 250gb sata-1 does fine in my prescott 630 box. i bareley even come close to filling that up. is ubuntu that space-frugal or am i a dork? what do people do to take up 1 tb of space? i see speed but not size. feature creep to me.

[370forlife]

Re: The beauty of modern hard drives

Games mostly. New games are 15gb or bigger nowadays, and if you are illegally downloading them, you have both the image and the installed version.

[crocodile2009]

Re: The beauty of modern hard drives

I've got a 64Gb SSD drive, but I would probably buy a VelociRaptor if I could go back in time.

SSD have major freezing issues, which has something to do with the way Windows writes to the drives. Apparantly Windows 7 will fix most of the problems however, but that means moving away from my beloved Win XP.

[KeriJane]

Re: The beauty of modern hard drives

what do people do to take up 1 tb of space? i see speed but not size. feature creep to me.

Over here, Video editing takes up gobs of space. So does piles of photos, a bunch of audio and website material. Games take up almost no space. (for me, that is!)

I've got:
1- WD Caviar Black 1TB for Mac system disk,
1- Hitachi 320gb for Windows (seldom used)
2- Hitachi 500gb in RAID0 for storage

2- WD Green Power 1TB (2TB total) in an external Firewire 800 enclosure for Backup (Time Machine)

The RAID set is about 40% full, as is the Caviar Black.
The 2TB external is about 70% full.

It adds up in a hurry,
Keri

[bgavin]

Re: The beauty of modern hard drives

You have simply GOT to trim down your porno collection...


My personal system has 1.3 TB internal, and various 640gb externals in the Venus USB/SATA external chassis.
Gotta love those Caviar Blacks.

BTW, Western Digital just announced the 2TB caviar black for $299 retail.
Ditto for the "industrial" RE4, available through OEMs. I've had a few RE3 fail, but no Caviar Black yet.

My installed Seagates are starting to fall out after 1 to 2 years of service.
DiskCheckup shows very high error counts, so I get them replaced prior to failure.

[bgavin]

Re: The beauty of modern hard drives

SSD have major freezing issues, which has something to do with the way Windows writes to the drives. Apparantly Windows 7 will fix most of the problems however, but that means moving away from my beloved Win XP.

I'd toss the SSD before I tossed XP.
Sell it to a Mac or Linux user.

[Junk Parts]

Re: The beauty of modern hard drives

I'm bringing a knife to this gun fight here...LOL I'm still on the old IDE Ultra ATA100 stuff I think. In my personal Dell junkers I have all WDC600BB drives. Got a pile of these drives used for next to nothing. I think my wife is using a single WDC800EB drive which I bought new. I guess they are good enough for us but I would like to have more space. It would be so nice to have enough space to save 30 or 40 Movie DVD image files to so I could burn them to disk when I feel like it. I need to do a little research and find out what the bios limitations are on this 4550 Dell then buy it a big pig Hard drive someday.

[washu]

Re: The beauty of modern hard drives

SSD have major freezing issues, which has something to do with the way Windows writes to the drives. Apparantly Windows 7 will fix most of the problems however, but that means moving away from my beloved Win XP.

What drive do you have? Lots of "cheap" SSDs have crappy controllers and have freezing issues. Good SSDs don't have this problem, even in XP. Get a good one with an Intel, Indilinx or newer Samsung controller and you won't have these problems.

Windows 7 can only "fix" the issue if the drive supports TRIM, which none of the crappy ones do. Some of the good ones do, but it only makes the drives even faster as they don't freeze even without TRIM.

[Per Hansson]

Re: The beauty of modern hard drives

Wizard; yea, I've read alla Anand's SSD articles, they are just awsome, read the latest one right when it was published yesterday

crocodile2009; if your SSD stutters it's a shitty SSD, sell it on eBay to someone you don't like and get an Intel or Indilinx based SSD, they are simply amazing!

I used a SSD a couple of months ago, it was a quite old Samsung based model, but man it made my system fly!
I think the current price of the new Intel G2 X25-M drives is quite good for what you get, I may wait a while still tho, would be awsome with SATA-III SSD drives since they currently really are interface limited at 260MB reads on SATA-II...

[i4004]

Re: The beauty of modern hard drives

>You have simply GOT to trim down your porno collection...

comedy gold!

[NxB]

Re: The beauty of modern hard drives

My sata drives seem to be slow. All I get is 60 MB/s on the small drives and 80-100 on the terabyte drive. I didn't wait to do the full test so I don't know if its accurate.

Right now I have:

1x 1TB Hitachi HDT7210
2x 250 WD2500JB PATA
2x 250 WD2500JD/JS SATA
1x 300 ST3300831AS SATA

So a total of 2.3 Terrabytes, only 781G open. I only got the TB drive last month and I had to RMA my memory. I have at least 3 or 4 other drives sitting around but I can't fit them in the case until I buy another HDD controller and some removable bays.

[dood]

Re: The beauty of modern hard drives

I'm currently running (in my home PC) a Seagate 80gb SATA primary, a Seagate 250gb SATA secondary, and a Maxtor 200gb PATA thirdiary. I keep a close eye on the Maxtor, as it was purchased very cheaply (at the time) from Staples. It currently has 36,721 hours, according to SMART.

Here's the bench info

Seagate 80gb - (Read) Max 70.2mb/s Min 25.6mb/s Avg 57.8mb/s Burst 106.6mb/s Access 14.1ms
Seagate 250gb - (Read) Max 80.5mb/s Min 40.1mb/s Avg 66.6mb/s Burst 104.9mb/s Access 13.6ms
Maxtor 200gb - (Read) Max 61.6mb/s Min 32.4mb/s Avg 50.4mb/s Burst 74.4mb/s Access 15.6ms

I have a Seagate 7200.7 80gb drive on my desk here, but I seem to remember that it may be bad. I still need to test it one of these days.

[weirdlookinguy]

Re: The beauty of modern hard drives

It seems the general consensus around the net is that Caviar Black drives are impressive.

Here's my WD6401AALS - the 640GB version of your drive:

[acstech]

Re: The beauty of modern hard drives

I read somewhere that the WD Black series drives are really RE series drives set up for single drive desktop usage. Anyone know if there's any truth to this?