1TB Hard Drive Roundup

Reviews: Storage

1TB Hard Drive Roundup - Update

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Richard Poelling
Brian

Dec. 4, 2008

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Introduction

Barriers are meant to be broken. This is true for any industry (I think they call it competition), but in the computer industry it is very apparent as each company tries to claw its way to the top. These heated battles are settled in the marketplace arena, decided by consumers. Sometimes the losers come back stronger; other times they are acquired by other companies or just fade into non-existence. Hard drive manufacturers are among this fighting lot. As capacities have increased and prices fallen, each company wants those bragging rights of having the "biggest," or at least the fastest. The capacity war has been raging for a while. Breaking the Gigabyte barrier was an accomplishment. And, as drive capacities grew, the 1 Terabyte barrier was in the crosshairs. Earlier this year that, too, fell, with Hitachi announcing the first 1 TB drive at CES. I must admit, I was surprised that only Hitachi seemed to be present in this new 1 TB club. Surely others wouldn't let them get such a lead, especially in the large storage market?

As was expected, Hitachi did not remain alone for long. Consumers now have the choice of several TB drive manufacturers. Hitachi, Seagate, Western Digital, and Samsung are all selling 1 TB drives. I would like to tell you that I have a representative sample from each manufacturer, but, alas, I do not. The three drives which I DO have torturing rights to are the Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000, the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 (ST3100340AS), and the Seagate Barracuda ES.2 (ST31000340NS). Although Samsung and Western Digital are absent, we always welcome late entries (hint, hint...). UPDATE: Western Digital has taken up the challenge and provided not one, but two separate drives. The first victim is the WD10EACS or as they are now called the Western Digital Caviar Green. The second drive is the WD1001FALS, otherwise known as the Western Digital Caviar Black.

From the outside, all of these drives look very similar. The Seagate drives were sent to me in OEM form while the Hitachi arrived in full retail glory. The Western Digital drives also arrived as OEM versions. Each uses Perpendicular recording technology, which is currently the de facto standard for drives. The true differences in the drives aren't on the outside, but what is inside. The Hitachi was able to break the 1 TB barrier by adding an additional platter. Therefore, the Hitachi is a 5 platter, 10 head design. Seagate chose to increase the areal density of the drives rather than increase the number of platters, which explains their lag time to market. We will have to see if this choice pays off in the performance realm, or whether they gave Hitachi a free 6-month lead. Both of the Western Digital drives utilize a 6 head, 3 disk configuration. The particular Green drive I have includes a 16 MB cache, while the Black version is sporting a 32 MB cache. The Green drive gets it name from the ecologically friendly method in which it operates. The Green drives are meant to have lower power consumption and a decreased heat load. This type of tuning does include transfer rate, so it will be interesting to see where this particular drive fits in with the others. The Caviar Black is just the opposite, touting speed over anything else. No mention of low power consumption here!

Testing

For drive testing, Windows XP SP2 with the latest patches was used. The drives were connected to the onboard SATA II connector on the ASUS A8N-E with an Athlon 64 4000+ CPU with 2 GB of DDR Ram. Each test was performed in triplicate and averaged to gain the final result. For some of the tests, I used an ISO file which I created from the Need For Speed Carbon DVD. This yielded a file of considerable size which, though not playable, has approximately 4.2 GB. For drive comparison I have labeled the Barracuda 7200.11 the AS drive and the Barracuda ES.2 the NS drive.

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Page 1: Introduction & Testing Procedure
Page 2: Benchmarking: HD Tach
Page 3: Benchmarking: DiskBench & IOmeter
Page 4: Quality & Conclusion

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