3TB Hibachi reviewed at Tech Report

CougTek

CougTek

Hairy Aussie
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Jan 21, 2002
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Review

It seems pretty fast for a mecanical drive. It's slightly above 200$ on my price lists. The two main drawbacks are the high idle power consumption (it's a five platters design) and noise, which is higher than most other modern mecanical drives.

Also, I can get many other 2TB drives for ~80-85$. While they are all slower than the Hibachi, 120$ for an additional TB is steep.
 
The 2TB Hitachi is getting downright reasonable. If nothing else, a new flagship will drive that bad boy's price downward. I can get behind that.
 
I bought two of these on special from NCIX for $180. I like the fact they're 7200 rpm drives. I've always found 5400 rpm drives to be noticeably (dramatically) slower. I guess it's those worst case seeks.
 
The 1TB and 2TB Hibachi drives have a firmware issue affecting some of their performances. I don't remember exactly, but there was a "C" somewhere in their model number. I've always avoided them for that reason. I saw that on reviews at xbitlabs.

The 3TB models doesn't seem to be affected.

And NCIX being cheaper than my suppliers? That's a rare event.
 
Although I'm a long-term fan of Hitachi/IBM drives, I have to question their wisdom using 600GB legacy format platters while competitors such as Samsung use Advanced Format for similarly-sized 667GB platters.

Samsung claims unrecoverable errors are an order of magnitude lower with their drives - I have no idea if that is true or not, but it becomes more significant as drive capacity increases.

Gilbo, the Samsung F4 is very fast for a 5400rpm drive; on my simple tests it can sustain a query rate very nearly as high as a 7200rpm Samsung F3, and is faster for file copies.
 
The reason Hitachi claims for sticking with older, less-dense platters is actually to reduce error rates. They claim that higher density platters are developing higher error rates.
 
I know the 2TB Seagates are just abortions in the disk error department. I think I believe Hitachi when they say that.
 
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