We pit the Seagate 7200.10, a perpendicular recording marvel, against the latest 500 GB monsters from Maxtor and Western Digital. What benefits does the new technology offer, both now and for the future?

Perpendicular recording will definately achieve previously unthinkable storage capacity. (I'm looking forward to two terabyte drives in raid 1 myself.) But face it, flash memory is the way of the future.

Cool! The times, they are a-chaingin. I liked the author's opinion at the close of the review. It might help to point out that 250GB drives can be had for around 32 cents per GB.

this statement surprised me:

"Even if you do a lot of video work, 3D rendering and CNC/CAD, it's still hard to visualize needing a drive over 250 GB."

I bought a 300gb internal drive a few months ago, and I filled it with downloads in 2 months. I was only using a 6mbit internet connection, nothing special.

now I need an external 300gb+ to back it all up.

these days it's quite easy to find enough stuff you want to fill a drive at these sizes. In my opinion, current hard drive technology is falling behind the capacity needs of the consumer. with HTPCs and PVRs doing so much recording, and now even HDTV coming into the picture, I am certain I will need at least one 500gb + drive within 6 months. When discussing this kind of capacity, and video recording, etc, the available media is grossly insufficient. It would take me FOREVER to burn 300gb of data to DVD's, therefore I already require a second backup hard drive.

By the time Blue Ray media and burners are actually economical, I will be far beyond the ability to use them in any reasonable fashion. I have piles of DVD's all over the house and it drives me nuts. why are we not moving away from the concept of media altogether?

Loved that article. Well-written, well-executed, and very informative.

The only thing I would have like to have seen included is how the lower density versions of the 7200.10 perform, with the fewer platters and all, being the drive is perpendicular.



That Flash file from Hitachi was wild.

Nice article. BUT:

"it's still hard to visualize needing a drive over 250 GB"

I wonder behind which rock the author is hiding...

I'm stoked that some work is being done on larger drives. I don't understand why the raptor is still so dang small though. Yeah - the 250GB comment is indeed strange - I don't do any video editing and I have 3 250GB drives in my PC.

I wish they would start making some 500GB and 750GB SAS drives as well. All of their server drives are PUNY!!!! Do they not understand that servers need VERY LARGE drives? It used to be that if you were looking at very large drives, they were going for the server market, now everything is backwards but the problem is that the server still need very large drives but little has been developed on that front short of having a 16 drive disk array. When space is limited it would be great to have 8 750 GB SAS drives or more since more would fit in the same space of your standard tower or rack server.

It should also be noted that current US street pricing on this drive is $378.00 USD (500GB models are at $245.99 USD). With that kind of price point along with its performance and 5 year warranty the Barracuda 7200.10 750GB should become the power users favorite HD.

The comment for video work was strange, my next build will be around 4TB's. At $756.00 USD per 1.5 TB thats not bad at all.

Ditto

I shoot quite a bit of DI and DV and gan gobble the gigs that way real fast. Then there's new music to be stored, etc. I think a 10TB server is what I need just to get through '06.

Good article

the best part was
http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/rese [...] ation.html
LOL

and as far as it goes....i do not know anyone can live with a 250 gig drive anymore....

Hard drive technology has advanced very slowly until recently. I'm hoping this is only the beginning of a cycle of rapid innovation.
1. How long 'till we see economical hybrid drives that mix flash memory with conventional platters? The "most used" programs & data would presumably be stored in the flash memory. (Or might they be stored in a completely separate flash drive?)
2. What technology/size/RPM do you guys think will be commonly available in 12 to 18 months? That is most likely when I'll be replacing my current 1 yr old drives (2x320WD).
Thanks for your predictions.

I missed that - good stuff. Perhaps a soft prno version would work?

I'm not sure if and when perpendicular will become mainstream. Assuming the manufacturing costs can be brought down, I don't know what might be most limiting with that tech. WRT RPM, I'd think desktop internals will still be dominated by 7200 RPM in the short term and size should just continue its slow march. Regardless, if 1TB drives are available for $300 in the near future, I'll be pretty happy. A six drive RAID10 of 1TB drives will work just fine for my music archive.

I'm personally interested to see hybrid hard drives hit mainstream. Hopefully then I can stop drooling over the 15K SAS drives Not sure why they're making Hybrid Drives: I would think the smart thing would be to embed flash on the CONTROLLER, not the drive.

Unless you're doing Digital Imaging, Ripping DVD's, or downloading game installs/ISOs, I don't see much use for > 250GB. I only use like 300 GB on my NAS, and I have a LOT of MSDN ISO's cached there, with various videos, backups, and MP3's.

(Scratching chin, staring at ceiling) Imagine an evga-like upgrade policy. Buy some flash sticks that plug into the controller socket. Save some more bucks, then trade those in for the next model up.

I'm approaching a TB of MP3s alone. All legally acquired, naturally. The problem is that for those not ripped off of my own CDs, I'm not comfortable just having one hard disc copy.

When it comes to hdd space, nope--I can't even fill up my 80GB or 74GB drives. You guys must be downloading lots of illegal stuff to be doing that--my files--including .iso files for both the x86 and x64 versions of Vista, an iso image for a trial of Windows XP x64 version Beta 2, IE 5.5 SP2 full and all later versions, SP1a and SP2 for winxp, SP6 and SRP 1b for NT 4.0, SP4 and SRP 1.0a for Windows 2000, and IE6 cumulative patches, as well as many dozens of nvidia drivers and ati drivers for multiple versions of Windows--all take up just 34GB at the end of the day. Add all those PC games in there I have installed and I use just over 58GB of hard drive space for my grand total.

My other drive has 35 audio CD's (all legal btw), recorded at 192kbps or better. Even with that I use a grand total of 73GB on my PC. Oh--forgot that includes a dual boot of Windows Vista x86 and Windows XP with SP2...

...So what do you guys need 250GB for again??? Uninstall that crap in Add/Remove Programs list and see how much you NEED...move/resize that gigantic page file of yours to a reasonable size, and for God's sake check your darn temp folders under every username, as well as the C:windowstemp folder (or C:winnttemp).

On average, the PC's I work on at work have over 5 gigabytes of temporary files alone--we're talking Joe Dumbey computers as well as those used in small businesses' offices. That's average! Now, the least I've removed is just under 1MB, that was a Computer Science guy's PC, and the most was over 29GB--that guy who had his PC turn off while downloading a DVD to his hard drive. He forgot to delete the corrupt partial copies...

Seriously, don't want to repeat history (nobody needs more than 640KB of RAM), but I can't imagine how you guys would ever fill up a 250GB hard drive with legal files, unless you watch your entire DVD collection on your hard drive, or prefer to listen to all audio in .wav format for 398 full-length audio CDs...

Same deal here

I use an 80 gig and have around 56 gigs free.

I did want an external drive on firewire as a backup drive for 3 systems, and thought 250 or 300gig external would work. And it wouldn't be running full time.

But man 750 gigs? Would there be a different meaning to, hay, when was it the last time you defragged your drive?

well 6000 flac files takes up about 130+ gigs and if you ever convert the stuff to other files those same flac files in MP3 take up about 30+ gigs in a good bit rate. so it adds up quick. and the fact that windows doesnt manage files well you cant even defrag a 250 gig hard drive with less that 30 some odd gigs free.

one thing that isnt very clear by his comment on 250 gig drives is did he mean total or just per drive. If he means per drive i can see that being logical because of the cost and also managability. Not to mention data safety, i would much rather have a terabyte of data across 4 drives instead of one.

but if hes talking about for a computer in general to not have more than 250 gigs i think hes smokin something.

My desktop has a 300 GB and a 120 GB drive, and I'm always low on space. Really, it's easy to fill up space even without illegal stuff. Modern games tend to come on 3-5 CDs or one installation DVD. They can take anywhere from 1-5 GB to install. DVD rips take up crazy space too, anywhere from 700 MB to several GB depending on length and quality (I mean rips you make yourself of movies you own). Also, you'll want to have space free for defragmenting. Furthermore, did anybody notice how the read and write speeds of the hard drives decreased as more space was taken up? If I understand correctly, to maximize I/O performance, hard drives write on the outside first, working their way to the inside, because the linear velocity is greater on the outter rim than the inner one. The more free space you have, the less you have to resort to that lower-performance region of the hard drive.

Then you have to consider the actual capacity of the drive being less than you bought due to the file system and the 1 GB = 1 billion bytes issue. A "750 GB" drive is really only 699 GB of space, less after the file system and operating system are installed. Add in various programs, add-ons, and space for temp caches, and you might be down to 675 GB of space. Throw in some more space for the recycling bin's temp space and System Restore points (which on my machine take up 1-10 GB of space, and I regularly remove them to save space) and you might be at 650 GB of space.

Now, take that 650 GB of space and start loading games up on it. This doesn't apply to non-gamers, but if you are a gamer, you've probably been collecting games for a number of years, and with games taking anywhere from a couple hundred MB (back in the early 2000's) to a couple GB (today) to install, a game collection might take up 50 or 100 GB. Save files can also take up space, with some games the save files are 10-20 MB each. Throw in a dozen of those per game and you've tacked on several more GB of content. That's how it always is, several GB here and there, a new program, a new temp cache, and it all adds up. If you're a photo buff and every picture is several MB, then a single vacation might end up being a GB of photos. If you like to record video, it adds up crazy fast. If you're an audio buff and enjoy uncompressed audio from your CDs, or you're a movie person and want the quality of a DVD but the access speed and resolution of a PC, space continues to be sucked away by the gigabyte.

Let's say that a game collection, large photo collection, music collection, and movie collection add up to take several hundred GB, which is not unreasonable (my computer being the prime example). Your drive is over half filled, by which point your performance has started to degrade. Putting in more will aggrevate the problem.

If you're the type who records TV shows or downloads unliscensed, fan-subtitled anime, a single show that airs once a week at pretty good quality can take up 170 MB per episode, or about 4.5 GB per 26-week season. And if you buy into the HD-revolution, it can be double that size. A 1280x720 anime episode (lots of still frames, little motion at once, and using the H.264 codec to save space) can take 300-400 MB of space, for a SINGLE episode.

Thus, a mighty 750 GB drive is slowly filled (or quickly, if you already have the content available) with video, music, photos, games, temp caches, and the like.

Now, this isn't to say everyone NEEDS that space. Sure, you can set the recycling bin to immediately delete anything you put there, you can give your 'net programs a whopping 5 MB of cache space, you can purge your computer of video files and keep your MP3 collection at a modest several GB. You can get along with 80 GB of space (my laptop has 40, or 32 after the damn IBM restore partition) if you're thrifty or not a media enthusiast. But as long as drive prices continue to drop, why wouldn't you want the extra space? It keeps your performance from tapering off and if nothing else, makes you feel good when you see that you have 90% space free.

I can understand people will have different needs.

For example, converting old media (VHS/BETA/CAMCORD) video to DVD, does require alot of storage, and time.

Ripping your own DVD's in a sense doesn't make that much sense to me.

At this point, I have not ever had a DVD go bad and have to rely on a backup, nor do I have the need to rip any of my own stuff. Its not like you really need to backup movies that you need to watch every day, come on.

I understand games do take up space, but can be installed to where you don't have to have the total installation on HD. Athough I can see the pain of that.

I guess it also would have to do with a users way of managing HD space. I know my Dad is a pack rat, since sometimes he thinks he needs to keep certain files/exe and it become bloated with files he may not need to keep. Thats where I normally help him with.

But it is amazing how far HD have come to storage space and performance.