SubscribeA double whammy for storage buffs today: both Hitachi and Seagate in the first half of this year (sooner, in Hitachi’s case).
I’m not surprised that the 1TB limit has been reached. I’m surprised, rather, that Hitachi’s offering is going to be only ≈$400. As of a couple of weeks ago, Seagate’s 750GB drive was well over $500.
Certainly, perpendicular recording was a breakthrough, but at the same time, I’m still waiting for all the revolutionary technologies we’ve been promised—rather than creeping up by degrees, things like HAMR will very suddenly give people way more storage than they need.
Still….. one terabyte is an awfully big drive for only $400. Though I’d hate to buy it, fill it with data, and have it go south (Hitachi’s got a shaky reputation).
Christopher
/ Friday, January 5th, 2007I’ve got to be honest, I think I’d rather go with a Raid0 setup, just because it should faster access times and parallel reads.
rob
/ Friday, January 5th, 2007Christopher, double the chance of failure, twice the data to lose, and a negligible (if even existent) performance increase? Sod that.
Ben
/ Friday, January 5th, 2007The more hard drives I accrue, the more worried I am about such a thing. The problem is, the temptation to double storage space as opposed to making it doubly secure is a great one.
rob
/ Friday, January 5th, 2007Three or four of these in a RAID 5 looks very tempting. 2-3GB of storage from 3-4 drives tolerant of one drive failure? That’s the stuff of dreams.
Yes, yes, “RAID isn’t a backup!”, but none of my data is important enough to warrant more than that. I FTP university stuff so it’s on my local machine, my web server and my university network storage; everything else I can pretty much afford to lose, since it’s just either media that I can re-acquire or installed programs I can re-install.
rob
/ Friday, January 5th, 2007Also, Hitachi aren’t “shaky” at all—the days of “Deathstars” are long gone.
Ben
/ Friday, January 5th, 2007Well, granted, I haven’t really researched hard drives since I was building my computers in 2003/4. You say that Hitachi’s changed the Desktar reputation?
rob
/ Friday, January 5th, 2007From what I’ve heard, certainly. Not tried one myself though; I have two Maxtors and a WD. I based my decisions on price-per-GB primarily and then warranty, although most brands are much of a muchness.
Christopher Egner
/ Saturday, January 6th, 2007Seriously? I guess I just assumed that it’d be faster, I’ve never really had a reason to use raid. Fair enough.
S4R
/ Saturday, January 6th, 2007What about noise from these things? My understanding is that Seagate’s 750s are already noisy.
Heliologue
/ Saturday, January 6th, 2007Chris—
It depends on the RAID config. Striping could be faster in theory, but there are a lot of bottlenecks for a desktop rig.
S4R—
The existing line is only increasing in size by increasing aureal density, which shouldn’t have any effect on the mechanical noise. The complaints you hear about loud Seagates might simply be from extraneous circumstances, like improper mounts, bad units, or poor sound dampening in the tower.