The only important factor with these drives is reliability, and from what I have seen in the field ALL these drives fail at an oft ridiculous and alarming rate.

For some reason it seems to be an industry standard to use multi-drive backup systems in place of fixing the faults in the first place.

the 1.5TB drives from seagate have been out for about 2 weeks now, buy.com had them for 200$ but now charges 240$ just to price gouge i guess

. Spending an additional $20-30 usually justifies going for the sexy terabyte capacity point, which should provide sufficient storage space for several years^h^h^h^h^h months.

Fixed that for you!

Only thing this proves is Hitachi is cool,and the VelociRaptor is the best drive available.

Does any of you know if the current hard drives write/read information in parallel to/from each platter?

Just wondering if the hard drive performance could be improved by doing some kind of raid 0 internally in the hard drive.

I agree that reliability and lifespan of such drive were more important. Having such big storage means keeping important files consuming large space and i cant imagine the scenario lossing all of it because of failed drive after few months of use..

The heads aren't lined up well enough to do that. When one head is on a track, the others are slightly off.

Wait a minute! You mean to tell us that WD marketing types actually let their products out as "Black & Blue"??? Ha, ha, ha. Sounds like a bruise!

Too bad you didn't include the latest revision of the 1 TB Western Digital Green Power drive WD10EACS-00D6B0. It uses the same 3 platter design of the Caviar Black and features reduced power consumption and increased transfer rates. It's already been tested by other sites to use 1.25 watts less power in idle compared to the original 4 platter design. It's also been shipping since May 2008.

The solution to global warming has arrived.

so the Caviar Green clearly requires revision.

False. WD10EACS D6B0 is already out. 3 platter new design.

Are these 7k1000.b Hitachi drives out yet? I can't find them anywhere. The only that has popped up for me on a google search has been the 250gb capacity.

If the heads are slightly misaligned then in order to accomplish this task, the actuator would need an additional alignment control for each head. This additional controller would only need to be able to move its head the width of a few tracks one way or the other. It would also probably require separate control logic for each head as well since each head would be searching for its proper track in parallel.

In short, it would require many changes to the internal controls and firmware and would probably increase the costs to manufacture the drive but it could provide a significant boost to performance.

The additional controls may also introduce a reliability issue but it could be designed such that if a component fails, the system "falls back" to a functioning but less optimal state.

Hi, I have been taking an interest in the efficiency ratings you are doing on drives. I wonder if you might do a round up of efficiency improvements over time (i.e. are hard drives getting more or less efficient as capacities and speeds increase and technologies change).

Also it might be interesting to retest drives after a couple of years hard work to see if their efficiency (i.e. watts per **) changes. Does the point wear down on a 'spinpoint' drive? What effect does this have?

As long as these drives are made in china, expect shit quality.

Yeah, after losing 3 damn drives, 250, 500, 500, I don't give a rats arse about minuscule diffs in speed and access time. I want a drive that IS going to last at least up to it's warrantied period! If I want speed, I'll be sticking with these Raptors I have. Drives are so large now, running 1TB (eh even partitioned) as a boot drive is dumb. Get a cheap 36GB raptor for the super snappy latency times and burst transfers.

Agree with those seeking reliability!

I have 1TB of data in limbo right now thanks to the (at least partial) failures of two Western Digital WD5000AAKS drives.

Obviously disenchanted with WD at this point -- though I have used them almost exclusively over the years, and they served me well up to this set of drives I bought about 18 mos. ago -- so I bought a Seagate ST31000340AS to begin the recovery process.

Today, looking to buy a couple more 1TB drives to be prepared to make redundant backups of all my valuable data before I attempt to bring it back online. Confronted with nothing but horror stories as I read review after review of Hitachi, Seagate, & WD, where people are complaining about fast, frequent, brutal failures. (...possibly aggravated by the fact that companies like Newegg and ZipZoomFly don't seem to want to spend the extra $1.50 on bubble wrap to provide adequate packing protection for hard drives when they ship them.)

The foremost question I would like answered right now is: "Which manufacturer/drive is not going to f*** me?"

Tom & Co., your advice is most appreciated. Thank you.

But this post is also an "open letter" to the manufacturers to let them know, in whatever small way, that customers (and even salespeople!) are getting tired of all these unreliable drives. (And also that maybe your shippers/distributors need to be held accountable for the condition these drives are arriving in.)

PS thanks for the anon. posting system. Every worthless site expects one to register/login these days, and it's nice to see sites of quality bucking that trend. You wouldn't hear from me otherwise. I mean... I've got more important things to do in my life than make/manage logins for every pissant site on the web... like, unfortunately, recovering failed HDs.

Hitachi 7K1000.B access time is 12.5ms - THG must have tested them with AAM turned on
(own 2x HDT721064SLA360 in RAID 0 - read/write 175/160MB/s on AMD SB600)
/bod

I agree with messages before me stating that manufacturers should stop creating less durable cr_p. Unless of course this is what keeps them in business.

I therefore bought an Intel X25-E SSD recently, and I'm quite happy with it as a boot-drive. Finally something I can rely on. At least, they claim their MTBF is humongously longer than with the common HDD and I trust Intel on that.

My guess is that we should have 1 TB HDDs in RAID-1 at least, to be somewhat at ease about crashing hardware.