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  • masher - Wednesday, July 14, 2004 - link

    Hummm yourself #15, the Seagates have fluid bearings as well. Its not just these two drives...all the results are highly suspect. The values are far too close together, both between drives and for the same drive between idle and load.

    The review numbers are wrong.
  • PrinceGaz - Monday, July 12, 2004 - link

    I'd also be happy to sacrifice some performace for extra space (and also increased reliability as well if it has a lower rpm) on my largest drive. The Quantum Bigfoot drive (5 1/4" 3600rpm) I bought in the late 90's was slower than most others but offered considerably more GB/$ than faster drives of its day, and was ideal for my needs then. Its still working fine to this day in my second box.

    When you're considering archival drives of many hundreds of gigs capacity, economy and reliability are far more important than speed.
  • stephenbrooks - Monday, July 12, 2004 - link

    #6's idea of wanting larger storage (not necessarily speed) also interests me. I guess if 133GB platters are available Q3 and 5-platter drives are engineerable now, then 5x133 = 665GB drives should be (theoretically?) possible from Q3. I'm looking forward to the race to the first 1TB drive in 2005.
  • jiulemoigt - Monday, July 12, 2004 - link

    hummm #14 look up fluid mechinics isolations then turn on a grinder, and weither his number are right the fluid ball bearings should be quiter than the graphite drives. My spelling is due to the time of night. I wouldn't have said anything but I have six raptors (the newer ones don't know how loud the old ones are) in an array and you have to get pretty close to hear them.
  • masher - Sunday, July 11, 2004 - link

    While I appreciate the addition of the sound ratings, I have a hard time believing them. The 10K Raptor quieter under load than a Seagate 7200? No way. The quietest disk of the bunch at idle is the 5 platter Hitachi? And the Maxtor only half a db difference between idle and load?

    Sorry, you did something wrong to get these numbers. All the values are far too close together for one...maybe your SPL meter is filtering out part of the spectrum, or reading some background noise.
  • PrinceGaz - Sunday, July 11, 2004 - link

    #12- I assume you didn't read the earlier review on RAID0 and the conclusion that there is negligible performance advantage to using RAID0 on a desktop PC. Although the article only considered two 74GB Raptors in RAID0, the conclusion is equally applicable to other drives, more drives, or other controllers.

    StorageReview.com noticed the article and all the comments from readers because they faced exactly the same criticism when they found RAID0 was basically worthless, and have posted a large editorial on their front page making it quite clear RAID0 is not worth using. I suggest you read AT's earlier atricle as well as those on SR.
  • pickxx - Sunday, July 11, 2004 - link

    I know you spend a lot of time making these and i greatly appretiate them but i would like a comparrison of RAID setups. I hear claims all the time about certin drives in RAID are faster then a 72GB Rapter or some drives are faster in RAID then others. I am just curious if you could do a set up of the top 5 individual drives and set them up in RAID.
    i am just throwing some ideas out there....
    thanx
  • mkruer - Saturday, July 10, 2004 - link

    "If its there, people will fill it!"
  • RossAdamBaker - Saturday, July 10, 2004 - link

    Article looks great! You can't beat a 400 gb hard drive! (Well, at least not for a few more days or so!) A quick question however... the PATA version of the hard drive loads UT2004 almost a second quicker than the SATA version. Is this an actual difference in the two drives, or is it just a fluke in the test that doesn't really have a technical basis to explain it? I see the SATA version beats out the PATA version in every other test, but being a gamer this definately raises my curiosity!

    Again, as always, great article!
  • jliechty - Saturday, July 10, 2004 - link

    What to do with 400GB hard drives? Aside from pr0n, serious photographers that work in digital (either straight from the camera, or scanned from film) can testify that once you get a .PSD with a few adjustment layers, some layer masks, etc., it might well reach the 500MB range or more (or if you got a drum scan, it might start out at 400-500MB before all the layer masks are added!). And most people don't shoot just a few images per month; draw your own conclusions.
  • Falloutboy - Saturday, July 10, 2004 - link

    This is great but unless it geting into the 50cents per gig range it won't really make sence. I could just get 4 200gbs for the same price and raid them
  • gimpsoft - Saturday, July 10, 2004 - link

    if you have space for 4 drives on your case
    i say go with mulitple 160GB hard drive or 149GB true GB
    149 * 4 = 596GB almost 600GB
    $93 * 4 = $372
    for $93each why pay $450 for 320GB
    samsung Hard Drives on newegg

    mulitple drives is much better then one
    C/windows E:/storage X:/storage D:/storage

    so you uncompress a file from C to C will take longer & won't be able to open anythign else until uncompress is done

    from E to X or from C to X you could surf the web have an dixv open with small slow down & have it finish faster then having to be done in one drive
  • Jeff7181 - Saturday, July 10, 2004 - link

    Nice to see capacities increasing. Seems like for a while there hasn't been much in the way of capacity increases... just some speed increases with the Raptor and SATA.

    A friend of mine heard about the drive too and asked why anyone would need 400 GB of storage space if they weren't doing anything illegal like pirating software or media. My answer to him was, programs (especially games) will only get larger. And with no worries about storage limits, you could rip your entire CD collection in a lossless format and keep it on your hard drive for listening and making MP3's to put on a portable device, etc. Then there's video... with more people building HTPC's, a 400 GB drive would be a nice addition to a HTPC for recording TV shows in HD... copying your DVD's to the drive for quicker viewing and not having to mess with the discs all the time.

    I think storage space is lagging behind a little bit... I have a 36 GB Raptor and an 80 GB drive and I don't find myself running out of storage space, however, I do find myself deleting things thinking "I don't really need this, I'll just get rid of it and free up some space." I remember back in the mid 90's I think, I bought a 12 GB Quantum drive, when high capacity mainstream drives were 6-8 GB... the Quantum was a HUGE drive at the time, but pretty slow. Where are the HUGE but slow drives today? I think it would be acceptable to use a 5400 RPM drive in a HTPC if it could offer 50-100% more storage space thana 7200 RPM drive, AND be more quiet and cooler. Or just for people who archive home movies or something... an 800 GB drive would be great for them... speed wouldn't matter all that much because a 5400 RPM drive is perfectly capable of streaming DVD quality video and audio.

    Anyway... as I said... it's nice to see storage capacity increasing, not just speed.
  • mkruer - Saturday, July 10, 2004 - link

    "If you can wait on that hard drive upgrade, however, much newer technology is coming next quarter. With platter densities finally surpassing the 100GB mark, 16MB buffers to accent and with NCQ becoming mainstream, the 400GB offerings that should hit the streets later this year will hopefully offer more than just massive storage capacities, but maybe even a new level of performance."

    Anand, do you have any specific information on future roadmaps by the manufactures. I would be interested to see how Western Digital will respond.
  • kjellrni - Saturday, July 10, 2004 - link

  • kjellrni - Saturday, July 10, 2004 - link

  • pookie69 - Saturday, July 10, 2004 - link

    Nice article. I can appreciate the difficulties in trying to bench and review HDDs, but so far i feel you have done a good job, and i am very much enjoying reading these HDD reviews.

    Only thing, it may have been a good idea to talk a bit about some of the technical features of the Hitachi 7k400 - such as those 2 sensors on the underside of the HDD that help ensure much greater spindle head accuracy through system vibrations than currently seen in other HDDs. The name of the technology evades me now, but it sounds really cool.

    In any case, great review - the Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 looks like being an awesome HDD, so i do hope that there'll be a rview on that sometime soon :)
  • ROcHE - Saturday, July 10, 2004 - link

    Nice review. The recorded hard disk sound is a very good addition. You guys just need to edit the first 1-2 and last 1-2 seconds to remove those weird sounds and it will be perfect.

    You can actually hear how silent is a barracuda and how loud is a Maxtor or a WD SE.

    It's good to see my one year old Western Digital SE near the top of the performance charts. It shows how hard it is to improve hard disk performances. Kudos to Hitachi for a great hard drive.

    Thanks ;)

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