320GB HD for 94.99

sechs said:
How much longer until 500GB drives make it to around $100?
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...when 250GB/platter is a mature technology. I guess by 2008.
 
So, er, next year?

My goal is to avoid upgrading my NAS until I can double its capacity for about the same price. Right now it's racked-up with 250GB Deskstars. By your figuring, I should be able to get relatively cool and quiet two-platter disks then.
 
What's the reliability on perpendicular technology hard drives? Will they last as long (longer?) and keep viable data sitting on the shelf? Have more or fewer errors?
 
Adcadet said:
does perpendicular technology make any difference right now?
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If you are talking about more that the obvious (storage capacity), then, yes.

I have a 750GB SATA2 Bacaruda 7200.10 and it can destroy my frisky 250GB SATA2 Hitachi Deskstar 7K250 in a multi-gigabyte read/write drag race.


Will Rickards said:
I don't think anybody can really answer that reliability question, even the drive manufacturers. We are dealing with 1st generation new technology here.
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Available perpendicular recording technology might be considered "first generation" by many, but it's far from being new or untested. Owners of the Toshiba and Seagate storage devices using perpendicular recording technology are not guinea pigs. The next generation of perpendicular recording technology will simply be a percentage increase of whatever you have now.
 
mubs said:
Care to elaborate with numbers, Sir?
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I typically use a "real world" benchmark as simple read or write copy jobs consisting of large files (for example -- a dozen or so 800 MB binary files) or sometimes a folder full of small files (for example -- a few thousand 50 KB binary files).

I time with a stop watch how long it takes to write or to read a "punishing" copy job like the ones described above. The one I did with the 750 GB Barracuda 7200.10 and the Hitachi 7K250 was a bit of a mixed job with about a 100 random small files and something like 7 GB of large files 600 GB or 700 GB TIFF files.

With both drives freshly formatted with an NTFS file system and empty, copying from a Seagate 36 GB 15K.4 SAS hard drive (source drive), the Hitachi 250 GB SATA2 drive took 3 minutes and 2 seconds to complete the write job. The Seagate 750 GB SATA2 drive did it in 1 minute 50 seconds. I did the the twice just to make sure.

Normally, I've been using the Hitachi 7K250 as a backup target using MS Backup (that's what I bought it for). I did two identical backup jobs -- one with the Hitachi 7K250 and another with the Seagate 750GB drive. Both completed in close to 8 minutes or so. The Seagate was 15 seconds faster, which doesn't mean much other than MS Backup is the bottleneck.



 
Thanks Gary. Your kind of testing and numbers are precisely what I was interested in, not synthetic benchmarks in a lab.

That's one heck of a performance improvement. And I just bought a pair of the same Hibachis. Oh well. :-D
 
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