1TB and Beyond

Hitachi began the Tera Era by being first to launch a1TB hard drive. Now the

race is on to go beyond that. The first to outdo everyone is Seagate with the

launch of its 1.5 TB drive. Apart from Capacity and faster spindle speeds, now

'Green' being the theme of the year, most HDD manufacturers are focusing on

making environment friendly and energy efficient drives. Western Digital upped

the ante on being 'Green' with its Caviar series drives. We received hard drives

of 1TB or greater capacity from all these three manufacturers, and here is their

comparative review.

Seagate Barracuda 7200.11:1.5TB



If a 1TB hard-drive is insufficient for you and you don't have space to add
another drive, you needn't worry as Seagate has introduced a 1.5TB HDD, which

will provide you massive storage capacity within the same form-factor. To

achieve the capacity of 1.5 TB, Seagate didn't cramm in any additional disk

platter, rather increased the disk storage density to about 375GB, so that the

hard-drive's thickness doesn't change. With the launch of this Barracuda drive,

Seagate marks the single largest capacity jump in the history of hard-drives, an

increase of 500GB from the previous highest capacity of 1TB.

As the name suggests, the drive has a spindle speed of 7200 RPM, and it uses

Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR) technique, wherein the data bits are

arranged perpendicular to the disk's platter, as against the lateral alignment

of bits in legacy drives. Thus, Barracuda raised the bar on capacity front. As a

result of higher areal density of the platters, the drive's performance has

increased, and can provide a sustained data rate of upto 120MB/s. The drive is

eco-friendly as it meets the RoHS requirements and also consumes lesser power;

when at idle mode it consumes 8W, and when compared to other Seagate drives, is

lower. At this price and such a huge capacity, the drive is an ideal choice for

Home Theater systems and high-end gaming machines where space is a constraint

and capacity demand is always high.

Hitachi Deskstar E7K1000:1TB



This 1TB drive is meant for enterprises having features for business critical
storage systems. The drive embodies Rotational Vibration Safeguard (RVS)

technology that helps to maintain drive performance even in high-vibration

environments. Also for such critical business functioning, the hard drive

failure could be a potential threat; E7K1000 has a targeted 1.2



million hours Mean Time Between Failure rating that results in robust
performance.

Like Seagate's 1.5TB drive, this one also has 32MB cache, 3Gb/s SATA

interface, and 7200 RPM spindle speed. Besides performance, the drive is energy

efficient too because of advanced power management and HiVERT technologies at

its bay. It consumes just 5.2W of power when it's at idle mode.

Despite beingh priced highest among all the drives, this being an

enterprise-class is is best suited for archival solutions in nearline storage

and in multi-disk environment.

WD Caviar Green: 1TB



Western Digital went Eco-friendly by launching a 1 TB hard drive that's a miser
when it comes to power consumption. As the capacity of a drive increases, the

prower required to run such a drive also increases, but contrary to that, this

Caviar Green 1TB drive just sips on power when its power consumption is compared

to the other two drives above.

It has a 32MB buffer memory which ensures accesses to the drive are reduced

thus increasing performance. Caviar Green has a sub-7200 RPM spindle speed,

unlike the other two, because it uses IntelliSeek technology that calculates

optimum seek speeds to lower the power consumption as well as noise and

vibrations.

This is the reason, at idle mode, it consumes a meager 2.8W of power while

during read/write operation, it goes up to 5.4W which is nearly similar to

Hitachi's power consumption of 5.2W in idle mode. The drive is quieter in

operation and lower on power consumption. It can be used for secondary desktop

storage or as a home file server, where performance can be traded up power

saving.

Performance Results



We tested the drives on an Intel Quad Core based machine with 2GB RAM. Hitachi
E7K1000 which is meant for nearline storage solutions, scored the highest in

almost every test. It was beaten just by a fraction in average transfer rate by

Seagate's Barracuda 1.5TB drive, which can be attributed to the higher areal

density per disk of the drive, which results in its enhanced data transfer rate.

While WD's Green drive operates at sub-7200 RPM speed, its performance matched

that of Seagate 1.5TB drive as it scored higher in the Business Disk Winmark

test. Hitachi was the leader with 88.7 MB/sec in High-end Disk Winmark test,

which checks the drives throughput for high-end applications.

Bottomline: The Seagate 1.5TB drive is ideal for those

who do not want to increase their storage capacity by increasing their

bay-counts. Hitachi E7K1000, with its features for robust performance, is ideal

for enterprise usage. While WD Caviar Gr een is for those who can give up a

little bit of performance to save power and also contribute towards environment.