Hitachi's 4 TB Hard Drives Take On The 3 TB Competition
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Page 1:Three And 4 TB Hard Drives For Your Digital Lifestyle
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Page 2:3 TB: Hitachi Deskstar 5K3000 (HDS5C3030ALA630)
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Page 3:3 TB: Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000 (HDS723030ALA640)
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Page 4:3 TB: Seagate Barracuda (ST3000DM001)
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Page 5:3 TB: Seagate Barracuda XT (ST3300651AS)
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Page 6:3 TB: Western Digital Caviar Green (WD30EZRX)
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Page 7:4 TB: Hitachi Deskstar 5K4000 (HDS5C4040ALE360)
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Page 8:Hitachi Deskstar 7K4000 (HDS724040ALE640)
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Page 9:Test Setup And Comparison Table
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Page 10:Benchmark Results: Transfer Diagrams
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Page 11:Benchmark Results: Interface And Throughput
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Page 12:Benchmark Results: Access Times And 4 KB Random I/O
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Page 13:Benchmark Results: I/O Workloads
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Page 14:Benchmark Results: PCMark 7
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Page 15:Benchmark Results: Temperature And Power Consumption
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Page 16:Capacity Marches Forward, Commands A Premium
Benchmark Results: I/O Workloads
We're including our I/O workloads, which simulate database, file server, Web server, and workstation activity, simply for the sake of comparison and completeness. They really aren't all that relevant to the desktop-oriented hard drives in this round-up.
Summary
- Three And 4 TB Hard Drives For Your Digital Lifestyle
- 3 TB: Hitachi Deskstar 5K3000 (HDS5C3030ALA630)
- 3 TB: Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000 (HDS723030ALA640)
- 3 TB: Seagate Barracuda (ST3000DM001)
- 3 TB: Seagate Barracuda XT (ST3300651AS)
- 3 TB: Western Digital Caviar Green (WD30EZRX)
- 4 TB: Hitachi Deskstar 5K4000 (HDS5C4040ALE360)
- Hitachi Deskstar 7K4000 (HDS724040ALE640)
- Test Setup And Comparison Table
- Benchmark Results: Transfer Diagrams
- Benchmark Results: Interface And Throughput
- Benchmark Results: Access Times And 4 KB Random I/O
- Benchmark Results: I/O Workloads
- Benchmark Results: PCMark 7
- Benchmark Results: Temperature And Power Consumption
- Capacity Marches Forward, Commands A Premium
Did you encounter any issues with testing drives this large (they need a GPT vs MBR, and booting from them also requires a specific setup)?
At that capacity, why bother with 5400 RPM?
I have had an incredible failure rate with hard drives beginning around the time that the move to perpendicular recording became the norm. I am not alone in this regard. I'm pretty sure that the drive manufacturer's are aware of serious reliability issues, but their RMA policies are ridiculous. I would be willing to pay current market prices for a new drive if vendors stepped up their game with quality control and some appropriate policies addressing data security in the event that a drive is returned - the risk of granting someone else access to my banking, tax information, and whatever else was on the failed drive is generally not worth returning the drive. Vendors know this, and take advantage of it. Until the situation changes, or drives return to their previous rock-bottom sale prices, I will do everything in my power to avoid purchasing more hard drives.
There hasn't been a truly loud hard drive on the market for many years. It shouldn't be an issue.
My Hitachi 2TB drives beg to differ.
When they start chugging along, it sounds like a snow plow clearing a parking lot in my room
I see two parameters for each drive: The media transfer speed and the I/O performance. The first one sounds like the speed to read/write to the disk. AFAIK, it's the speed at which the drive actually reads/writes bits to/from the surface of the platter. In that case, what does the I/O performance mean? It sounds really similar to read/write, but reading these reviews, I get the feeling there's more to I/O.
Thanks.
It doesn't feel like HD vendors are making products suitable for the safe-keeping of data when
warranties are as little as a year. I'd rather the industry started leaning more towards reliability.
As drive capacities increase, the consequences of a failure become more serious in terms of the
amount of data lost (images, video, etc.)
I was told by a movie studio guy a while ago that they were once supplied with a batch of ordinary
consumer-type SATA drives by mistake; almost all of them were dead within a week. For Seagate
(for example), get the models that end with NS if you want reliability, not AS (or try hunting for 15K
SAS instead).
Patrick/Aschim, a couple of typos/points:
- Drive Surface Temperature (C): this should be Celsius, not Centigrade (the latter was
formally dropped in 1948 to avoid confusion with a term found in Spanish and French for
angular measurement).
- IOMeter 2006.07.27 4K Random: should be 'Reads' instead of 'Reades'.
Ian.
Also, review the new velociraptor!
There are two reasons for that. First of all this is a new product, so it doesn't have the best bang-for-buck value out there. If you want the cheapest $/GB HDD you probably need to look at 2TB drives. (I recently saw a 2TB external USB 3.0 drive selling for approx. 110$ ; externals are more expensive than internals)
The second reason, and Tom's has mentioned this a few times on the website, is due to the flooding in Thailand last year that severely hindered the manufacture of HDDs, so supply was diminished. As far as I know, inflation in HDD prices will still take a few more months to subside.
there is on anandtech
not advertising or anything, just saying a review which is not here is availble there plus I'm not affiliated in any way with them