Storage Solutions An opinion to the eternal question "WHICH CURRENT HDD SERIES ARE THE BEST"

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Eazy

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I came across this post at the Storagereview forums and am quoting it here for people to read - I dont think we should take this as the final answer to the question of whish is the BEST HDD ..... BUT ..... the author of the post is a very highly respected member of Storagereview forums so take this as an opinion of someone who knows a lot on HDDs.

The results quoted are got from the amount of HDD returned of those sold. I am sure these figures would be different for HDDs sold in India as it would depend a lot on the handling of the HDD enroute to the local stores.
Although 3 months on market is still a baby-age also for HDD, my pretty large distributors' information is showing exceptionally good reliability for 7200.10 320GB so far, just like the old famous 7200.7 was. On relative comparable scale it is 1.8 times more reliable than 7200.9 one-platter models, 2.2 times more reliable than the new Raptors, 3 times more reliable than WD3200 and WD800, 3.7 times more reliable than T7K250(250GB version), 4 times more reliable than Samsung P120 and P80SD series, 6 times more reliable than some larger capacity 7200.9 models, 9 times more reliable than 7200.8 models, 11...19 times more reliable than Maxtor's MLIII/DM10 series.

Of course, usually this rating would drop in some amount in future when the new drive series gets more mature. Also, there may be some local delays in RMA'ing which could arise the rating especially for the models being on market just couple of months yet. But still, looks very promising anyway... However I was not able to detect any realistic ratings for 750GB and 500GB models from 7200.10 series because of just insufficient number of drives sold yet.

However, on side-note, looking on a few other aspects, there's something wrong with WD4000 and WD5000 series which are always giving lower than average reliability ratings. But at the same time these more-expensive series aren't sold in very big quantities yet, so the results can't be taken very seriously so far. The other clear finding is that so-called "short-stroked" models have always about just 2 times lower reliabilities than for their basic "mother" models! And that's equally true for Seagate, WD, Hitachi (didn't analyzed others). Interesting, sounds like these "short-stroked" models really have including a lot of bad drives from mother series formatted onto lower capacities...

This is Post No 187 in this thread....

Seagate 7200.10 Review - Discussion@SR
 
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zhopudey said:
What is this "short stroked" and "mother" models? What is the basic model for 7200.10?

If you take lets say the Hitachi T7K250 250GB HDD and check its platter sizes and if you find that it uses 125GB platters and it has 2 platters - than that means it is a mother model which means it is using the full capacity of the HDDs platters.... BUT ... if Hitachi find that many of the platters on these drives have developed a few bad sectors or defects or they want to include smaller size HDDs without retooling a new die (whatever ?) and they cannot give full capacity of the platter than they mark out parts of the HDD as unusable and sell them as 200GB HDDs so each 125GB plater now uses only 100GB on each platter. AND before you ask I understand NO you can never access the area beyond 100GB on these short stroked HDDs.

In case I am wrong someone please correct me.

About the 7200.10 if I am not mistaken it has 160 GB platters so the 320 and 160GB versions of this drive is MOTHER model as they would have 2 and 1 platters but if they release a 200 or 250GB version of this drive then it could be short stroked. I think they have a 250GB of this 7200.10 ... right ?
 
Here is something VERY interesting I found at Storagereview....

For example: T7K250 has random access time of 12.95ms. Random seek time is 12.95 minus 4.17 = 8,78ms. If you short stroked the HDD by partitioning it to a lower capacity, the seek times inside the partition would be lower. Is the capacity was for example 25GB of 250GB, that doesn't automatically mean 1/10 of random access time. But lets assume it would mean that:

Random seek (within the partition): 8.78/10 = 0,88ms.
Average latency: 4.17ms. (Unaffected by short stroking!)
Random access (within the partition): 5.05ms. (Not 1.3ms!)

This is post no 57 in this thread.... .. SR's 250 GB Drive Roundup - Discussion@SR

This is really good information !! You can boost up HDD rates by making a small partition as the first partition and using it for data or the OS where you need speed. I read in another Thread where people have made small 10GB first partitions on 2 HDDs and then made a Raid 0 on these parttions and they get terrific speeds out of this.
 
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zhopudey said:
I always had a 10gb partition for the OS :P Now now with sizes of appz increasing, I'v changed it to 20gb.

I have always had a 10GB partition for the OS and a 5GB partition for the Apps and balance of area for other stuff. All my HDDs are parttioned this way. I find my installed Apps occupy around 3.5GB.
 
TechHead said:
^What apps are you guys using to partition? Stupid PM8 isn't allowing me to partition the Seagate.

I always use the XP SP2 slipstreamed install CD - I partition and format from the recovery console - here I use "Diskpart" for partitioning and format with the command "format x: /FS:NTFS". I am not comfortable with partitioning and formating with XP's Disk Management. I read a thread at Storagereview where they had given reasons not to format via XP's Disk Management - cannot remember the reasons or trace the thread.
 
I discovered something recently - if I run the Hitachi Boot Record erase utility from their Drive Fitness Test disk and then partition and format the HDD then the data transfer rate improves quite a bit. Makes no sense to me but it does it so I run it. :)
 
@eazy : Thanks for the info, will definately try it out, though I've already got 10 gb partitions on each of my drives for the different os's that i"ve been using

@techhead- I've used Partition Magic 8 to partition & manage all my drives so far, without any problem, what problem are you facing ??
 
thexfactor said:
@eazy : Thanks for the info, will definately try it out, though I've already got 10 gb partitions on each of my drives for the different os's that i"ve been using

@techhead- I've used Partition Magic 8 to partition & manage all my drives so far, without any problem, what problem are you facing ??

I think the idea is to get MAX speed out of the HDD which is normally got from a HDD from the area of the first physical partition. I dont think further partitions would give the same speed. If you check a HDTach test result of your HDD you will see the part of the HDD which give the MAX speed and the area from where the speeds start to drop.

My impression is that Partition Magic does not give contigous partitions but picks up free areas of a HDDs and marks them as part of a Partition which is unlike Fdisk or XP's Disk Management's way of making partitions. If this is correct than using PM for making partitions for MAX speed may not be a good thing as the HDDs heads would be moving all over the HDD to read and write from a single partiton which may be spread across a HDD.
 
Think Partition magic does it the same way as xp disk management even though it doesn't show it in the gui, cause whenever i've tried to resize or create a partition, it first moves all the data to the beginning or the end of the partition and then creates a contigous partition in that space, which takes a lot of time depending on the size of the data to be moved. If it'd have just picked up free spaces then don't think it would take more than a few minutes.
 
btw.. eazzy.. what abt zhopudey`s question.. abt the hrd disk being mother..or short stroked? is that right.. whatever he said?

also hmm. what if you got 2 hdd`s .. and on the one wherein you install the OS the first partition is 12 gb.. second is 20 and so on..

while the other hdd .. the first partition is of 80gb. but itsonly for dumping files? does that affect performance?? cause the hdtach scores for me, on both hdd's were similar..
 
Eazy said:
About the 7200.10 if I am not mistaken it has 160 GB platters so the 320 and 160GB versions of this drive is MOTHER model as they would have 2 and 1 platters but if they release a 200 or 250GB version of this drive then it could be short stroked. I think they have a 250GB of this 7200.10 ... right ?
The 250GB model looks like its a short stroked 160GBx2 since the transfer rates are nearly identical. I could be wrong though. Check

http://www.techenclave.com/forums/480062-post60.html

http://www.techenclave.com/forums/480064-post61.html
 
thexfactor said:
Think Partition magic does it the same way as xp disk management even though it doesn't show it in the gui .

I was sure I read some years back about the partitions being made from available spaces - maybe they changed their system of working. I have never used PM so am not sure about the workings of the current versions. :)

chic_magnet said:
what abt zhopudey`s question.. abt the hrd disk being mother..or short stroked? is that right.. whatever he said?
also hmm. what if you got 2 hdd`s .. and on the one wherein you install the OS the first partition is 12 gb.. second is 20 and so on..
while the other hdd .. the first partition is of 80gb. but itsonly for dumping files? does that affect performance?? cause the hdtach scores for me, on both hdd's were similar.

I answered about mother and shortstrokes in my post after zhops question ... NAH ??

I am really not sure about an answer to your question about partitions and performances - but what I do feel is that if you run HDTach and check the graph you can see the data transfer speed of a HDD and you can see where this speed starts to drop.
 
Hey, I think I'd read something about a way to unlock more areas on hdds, to convert 80gb to 160gb or something like that. Maybe it was about this short stoked hdds.
 
^That was proven to be a bunch of bullcrap. The "unlocked" sectors were fuxored... they had been blocked for a reason :p
 
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