HD For Indies

One Terabyte Hitachi SATA drive compared to others

Bare Feats takes a good look at some of the new modern hard drives, which I haven't done in a while, and DAMN, they are fast!

For instance, the Western Digital 750GB SATA drive can read/write up in the mid-90 MB/sec - a year or so ago, the faster drives were good for maybe 65 MB/sec - this represents a roughly 50% increase. You'll still have fall-off in performance as they fill up (and data is written closer to the slower data transfering hub as opposed to the faster edge of the platters), but that certainly made me perk up.

In some recent testing of a Mac Pro, for instance, which had a 3x5000GB drive RAID 0, I was playing back uncompressed HD from a 3 drive RAID...without dropped frames! Very impressive. Of course, this was on a nearly empty array, so all data was at the fastest part of the array, and I didn't get a chance to do a zone test (test performance fall-off across the capacity of the array), so I don't know how sustainable that would have been, but newer, modern drives are definitely worth checking out for the speed improvements they yield.

Go read this article to see how the Hitachi 1TB, the Western Digital 750 GB, Seagate 750, and Maxtor 500 all stack up.

By the way - Seagate has been the most often cited as most reliable brand to me in terms of not failing as often as other brands. If building a RAID 0, that is worth noticing. In this lineup, however, that'll cost you over 20 MB/sec per drive.

-mike

Labels: hardware, storage