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Hardware Seagate, Samsung Begin to Ship 1TB Desktop Hard Drives
Purav Sanghani - June 19, 2007 12:20 PM

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58 comment(s) - last by lplatypus.. on Jun 25 at 9:16 PM

Samsung 1TB SpinPoint F1

Seagate and Samsung join Hitachi to make the 1TB desktop drive battlefield a 3-way bout

It is official. The desktop storage market now has three desktop hard drives to choose from with 1TB of capacity. Hitachi's launch beat Seagate to the punch as the 7K1000 series drive began shipping earlier this year but Seagate officially launched its 1TB model in the Barracuda 7200.11 line of desktop drives just recently. Samsung has also entered the mix by launching its 1TB SpinPoint F1 series desktop drive.

Six months ago Seagate confirmed it would launch a 1TB Barracuda hard disk drive in 2007. Seagate was the first to officially unveil a 1TB desktop drive after taking first place with the 750GB 7200.10 Barracuda. However, Hitachi announced its 1TB offering only minutes after Seagate's announcement in January and took advantage of a head start by bringing its product to the market earlier.

Retail 1TB Hard Drive Schedule
Drive Model	Platters / Density	Heads	Buffer	Price
Hitachi 1TB DeskStar 7K1000	5 x 200GB	10	32MB	$400
Samsung 1TB SpinPoint F1	3 x 334GB	6	16MB	$400
Seagate 1TB Barracuda 7200.11	4 x 250GB	8	32MB	$400

At $400 Hitachi, Samsung, and Seagate will offer hard drive space at roughly $0.39/GB unformatted. Seagate originally launched its 750GB Barracuda at roughly $0.54/GB.

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RAID 1

By Lord Banshee on 6/19/2007 12:58:06 PM , Rating: 2

If i had big of space depended on one drive i would have to get two and setup a RAID 1 mirror. Can you imagine losing 1TB of info... yikes.. I'm scared with my 320GB drive lol

RE: RAID 1

By masher2

(blog) on 6/19/2007 1:06:26 PM , Rating: 2

RAID is an uptime solution, and doesn't prevent you from losing data. Only a good backup plan can do that. Don't fall into the trap of thinking you're safe because your drives are RAIDed.

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RE: RAID 1

By KristopherKubicki

(blog) on 6/19/2007 1:10:02 PM , Rating: 1

The ironic thing is that when people buy drives to put in RAID, they are usually buying two drives that were built close together. If one fails from a defect, you can almost bet the farm that any drive built around the same time from the same facility will have the same defect and fail soon after anyway.

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RE: RAID 1

By 100proof on 6/19/2007 10:47:11 PM , Rating: 2

Kristopher, can you provide some definitive proof backing up the Japanese tech site's claim of a Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB 334gb/platter drive on the horizon? As I'm writing this now, while browsing Samsung's Press Releases there is no formal announcement acknowledging any such claim. You'll have to forgive me, but Samsung has not been known for their accomplishments in the storage industry. The spinpoint T series managed to finally reach 166gb platter capacities within the past year, and even then actual hard drive performance was far from competing with competing products from Seagate/Maxtor, Hitachi, and Western Digital.

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RE: RAID 1

By 100proof on 6/19/2007 11:23:00 PM , Rating: 2

Hmmm, maybe it's not a hoax after all.

320GB
HD321HJ - 8MB
HD322HJ - 16MB

500GB
HD501lJ - 8MB
HD502lJ - 16MB

750GB
HD752LJ - 16MB
HD753LJ - 32MB

1000GB (1TB)
HD102UJ - 16MB
HD103UJ - 32MB

PERFORMANCE SPECIFICATIONS
Read Seek Time (typ.)
-Track to track 0.8 ms
-Average 8.9 ms
-Full Stroke 20 ms
Average Latency 4.17 ms
Rotational Speed2 7,200 rpm
Data Transfer Rate
- Media to/from Buffer (max.) 175 MB/sec
-Buffer to/from Host (max.) 300 MB/sec
Drive Ready Time (typ.) 10 sec

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RE: RAID 1

By bhieb on 6/19/2007 1:42:08 PM , Rating: 3

That is true, RAID is not a backup, but at some point backing up everything becomes cost prohibative. Case in point I have a 12 disk 6.8TB box that houses my Movie collection. I have it in a RAID 6 so I would have to loose 3 drives before I could get home, turn it off and order a replacement drive. How do you back something that big up? My only real choice is 6 of these drive @ $2,400 total (actually only about 2.5TB now but you see my point). I own the movies (no ripping off Netflix), so it just boils down to what your time is worth to redo it all over again. The odds of loosing everything is so high I choose not to backup. Short of the house burning down it would be highly unlikely to loose any data.

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RE: RAID 1

By bhieb on 6/19/2007 1:44:25 PM , Rating: 2

However I would like to point out tha once these hit the $300 mark I will order at least 3 to backup the current data. I personally ran the CBA (or pain in the a$$ to redo calculation) and another $900 would be work the days it takes to redo all of them.

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RE: RAID 1

By masher2

(blog) on 6/19/2007 2:42:38 PM , Rating: 2

> "I have it in a RAID 6 so I would have to loose 3 drives before I could get home, turn it off and order a replacement drive..."

That's not quite true. When a RAID 5/6 array is in recovery mode, its vulnerable to loss of data. If you lose another drive during that lengthy period or if you simply experience a single sector read error, you're going to lose some data.

Since rebuilding two failed discs in a massive array can take many, many hours, the probability of another drive from the same run failing in that window is very real. The read error issue is even worse. True, you only use a file or two in that case, but the chances are very high a large drive is going to have at least one bad sector on it.

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RE: RAID 1

By OrSin on 6/19/2007 3:35:23 PM , Rating: 2

You guys must be joking. The chances of lossing 2 driver even from the same batch at the same or even close time is almost non-existant. I have order 240 drivers at once and after 3 1/3 years only 6 have died. And they was weeks aparts for the closest 2.

So but with the price of drive and the price of tape backup systems Raid a very real way to back up. Dont let anyone tell you other wise. It will not save you from a fire but neither will 6 backup tapes stored in the same room. So unless you are doing this for some client it much more reliable, faster and cost effective to raid or backup to another drive.

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RE: RAID 1

By masher2

(blog) on 6/19/2007 3:52:09 PM , Rating: 2

> "I have order 240 drivers at once and after 3 1/3 years only 6 have died..."

Google 'bathtub curve' and you'll see why this is meaningless. In another 18 months, those drives will all be at a different point in the curve, and you'll start seeing failures much closer together.

You can get around that by replacing drives long before their useful lifespan is up. But that adds costs too...and it still doesn't protect you from the rare double-failure, nor the far more commmon case of a failure + a read error.

Worse, RAID provides zero protection from application-level data corruption. If an app goes haywire and starts writing bad data to the array, what it overwrote is gone forever. Copy over a file, have a database get corrupted, delete a chunk out of a document then save it-- these are a few of the things backups protect against, but RAID does not.

Raid certainly is "good enough" for many people. But it is not a replacement for backups and it does not prevent data loss. If you have critical data-- back it up. Or you'll eventually lose it.

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RE: RAID 1

By Polynikes on 6/19/2007 5:13:21 PM , Rating: 2

I'm glad none of the data I have would really be missed that much.

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RE: RAID 1

By spindoc on 6/19/2007 4:23:03 PM , Rating: 3

I can't take it anymore...

lose /luz/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[looz] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation verb, lost, los·ing.
–verb (used with object) 1. to come to be without (something in one's possession or care), through accident, theft, etc., so that there is little or no prospect of recovery: I'm sure I've merely misplaced my hat, not lost it.

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RE: RAID 1

By natebsi on 6/19/2007 4:58:09 PM , Rating: 1

quote:
So but with the price of drive and the price of tape backup systems Raid a very real way to back up.

Thats cool, I used to think like you, too....that is, until my Adaptec 8-port SATA card failed, and I lost everything. Well, everything less than the stripe size anyway, which was everything except a few text/doc files.

There are other backup solutions, like online backups, DVD+R, etc, that can provide data protection. Look into them.

RAID is not a backup solution. Period.

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RE: RAID 1

By natebsi on 6/19/2007 5:13:49 PM , Rating: 3

quote:
I have order 240 drivers at once and after 3 1/3 years only 6 have died.

And by the way, I'm not accusing you of lying or making up numbers...but has to be some kind of record. I'd have to see it to believe it!

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RE: RAID 1

By Fritzr on 6/19/2007 10:33:21 PM , Rating: 2

Multiple failure does occur. One of the BOINC projects (Einstein@Home I think it was) took their servers offline to rebuild after a disk failed in a RAID 6 array. While rebuilding they had a second failure. It can & does happen.

One solution is multiple RAID ... RAID 15, 16 etc. that is a RAID 1 that mirrors RAID 5 or 6 arrays or RAID 5 or 6 arrays that use RAID 1 to mirror their elements. A RAID 15 array requires 3 drive failures including a mirror pair. A RAID 16 array requires 5 drive failures including two mirror pairs. You can go to the extreme of using RAID towers as "Inexpensive disks" in a RAID configured storage cluster.

Of course a controller failure can wipe every drive so you still have a single point of failure that can require restoration from backups.

This can be addressed by having disk writes mirrored to a second controller. Now you're vulnerable to a double controller failure and/or software problems.

Next step is automated incremental backups. Make sure that your backup media is stored redundantly...Not nice to discover the warehouse burned the same night your system failed :P

Nothing is perfect ... go for the level of stability that suits your willingness to rebuild from scratch. The movie server is fine. Vital records that have been electronically created had better have reliable storage & robust backup scheme. Different data sets have different tolerances for total loss.

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RE: RAID 1

By HrilL on 6/20/2007 1:34:56 AM , Rating: 2

Yeah I agree with you. One of our servers at work had a drive fail and as we were rebuilding the array another driver failed and all was lost. Good thing we did nightly backups to external drives since tapes just won't do the job when you need to back up 2TB and don't have an auto tape loader.

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RE: RAID 1

By DeepBlue1975 on 6/25/2007 10:45:17 AM , Rating: 2

For home users a RAID 1 solution is quite too expensive.
But backuping data to dvd is no great thing, either.
It's easier to loose data stored on a DVD than the probability of 2 hard drives failing soon enough between each other to not give you a chance of getting yourself another couple of drives (and then, sell or store the 2nd one you had and didn't fail)

Nevertheless, if you are going to loose data because of malware or viruses, RAID 1 gives you no protection at all.

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Samsung?

By Mudvillager on 6/19/2007 12:47:39 PM , Rating: 2

I thought Seagate always had had the the edge in HDD technology, but now it seems Samsung is ahead with their 334GB/platter density vs 250GB/platter on the Seagate.

Would be nice to see a comparison between the three.

RE: Samsung?

By Slaimus on 6/19/2007 12:54:42 PM , Rating: 2

Samsung, prior to their 300GB HD, never had more than 2 platters. Their 250GB drives were far ahead in density compared to other drives of the time.

IBM (Hitachi now), on the other hand, has been using 5 platter designs since the 75GXP DeathStars. It probably comes from their older expertise in server HD tech.

I think the two are just focusing on opposite technologies.

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RE: Samsung?

By KristopherKubicki

(blog) on 6/19/2007 1:11:34 PM , Rating: 2

Seagate and Hitachi both rely on Komag for their platters. I'm not sure who Samsung uses, though I would bet its a different platter company.

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RE: Samsung?

By Duraz0rz on 6/19/2007 1:21:39 PM , Rating: 2

I think Samsung is more known for producing quieter drives, hence the higher densities per platter and less platters on their drives.

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RE: Samsung?

By JoKeRr on 6/19/2007 2:12:57 PM , Rating: 2

I'm pretty sure Western Digital also released 1TB HDD, very recently as well. So it's actually a 4 way competition.

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RE: Samsung?

By TomZ on 6/19/2007 2:27:43 PM , Rating: 2

Have you got a link for that? I've so far only seen WDC external HDDs that are 2x500GB internally. WDC's web site is having problems at the moment, so I haven't been able to scrub that looking for individual 1GB drives, however.

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RE: Samsung?

By TomZ on 6/19/2007 3:21:41 PM , Rating: 2

WDC site is back:

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/ProductMatrix.asp

No 1TB drives there - largest is 750GB.

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RE: Samsung?

By exanimas on 6/19/2007 9:03:43 PM , Rating: 1

As much as I like WD as a company as well as their drives, I have to say that they are about a step behind the rest as far as capacity goes.

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Cache

By Omega215D on 6/19/2007 12:46:41 PM , Rating: 2

With these hard drive sizes increasing I would like to see caches beyond 16 or even 32MB.

RE: Cache

By SpaceRanger on 6/19/2007 1:27:45 PM , Rating: 2

Now.. Why would a comment like this get downgraded? "IF" more cache = more performance, sure I'd like to see more of it on the drives.

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RE: Cache

By Assimilator87 on 6/19/2007 2:03:04 PM , Rating: 2

That's because two of the drives, the Hitachi and Seagate, both have 32MB caches.

Anyways, is it faster to have more platters or less?

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RE: Cache

By A5 on 6/19/2007 2:19:46 PM , Rating: 2

Less platters = higher density = higher performance.

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RE: Cache

By Xavian on 6/19/2007 4:33:33 PM , Rating: 1

And even so, Hitachi Drives are almost at the top in terms of performance, so less platters doesn't mean more performance in most cases.

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RE: Cache

By lplatypus on 6/25/2007 8:51:07 PM , Rating: 2

The number of platters makes no difference to speed; having less platters is good for making a quieter/cooler/lower power drive though.

Each platter has two heads (one on each side of it). It is true that if you have less platters then the density of each platter will be greater, and hence each head will be able to read or write sequential data at a greater rate. However you've got less heads doing the reading or writing. In fact for a certain storage capacity and physical platter dimensions, the density is inversely proportional to the number of heads, so your total sequential read or write throughput does not change at all as a result of number of platters.

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Hitachi 1TB for $320

By TomZ on 6/19/2007 2:00:58 PM , Rating: 2

Forget $400...

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=8295...

RE: Hitachi 1TB for $320

By AcAuroRa on 6/19/2007 2:13:09 PM , Rating: 2

Best Buy actually sells the External Hitachi 1TB in most stores - although the external is at the not-on-sale price of about $400 i think.

That $320 is a sale price.

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RE: Hitachi 1TB for $320

By KristopherKubicki

(blog) on 6/19/2007 2:45:14 PM , Rating: 2

Some of those external 1TB kits are actually 2 x 500mb drives.

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RE: Hitachi 1TB for $320

By AstroCreep on 6/19/2007 3:27:44 PM , Rating: 2

Are they RAID-0ed or just JBODed? I'd bet on the latter, but I don't know.

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Boring

By Ihmemies on 6/19/2007 9:28:23 PM , Rating: 2

Still, samsung missed their chance to release a 2-platter 666GB disk. Instead they chose to release 2-platter 500GB disk. Boooring.

RE: Boring

By DNIndustry on 6/20/2007 12:16:21 AM , Rating: 2

Maybe they did and short stroked them....
:)

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RE: Boring

By DNIndustry on 6/20/2007 12:17:49 AM , Rating: 2

I meant only on the Aureal density... not the number of platters
:)

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RE: Boring

By DNIndustry on 6/20/2007 12:17:49 AM , Rating: 2

I meant only on the Aureal density... not the number of platters
:)

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failures?

By xbbdc on 6/19/2007 12:45:24 PM , Rating: 2

i'm all for bigger and better hard drives, but the "better" part being more reliability in it not crashing and losing 1 tb worth of stuff. i currently have all seagate drives (160,250,500,500) ~ 1.3 TB of space and would hate to lose any of it.

RE: failures?

By hubajube on 6/19/2007 6:36:37 PM , Rating: 2

Probably got down rated because there are already 32MB cache drives. Just a guess though.

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RE: failures?

By hubajube on 6/19/2007 6:45:36 PM , Rating: 2

What the hell? How did this get down here?

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1TB

By Yongsta on 6/19/2007 2:35:35 PM , Rating: 2

I remember when we were in the "mega" age. 100 megahertz cpu, 400 megabyte hd, 4 megabyte ram. Then the "giga" age came with 2 gigahertz cpu, 100 gigabyte harddrive 1 gigabyte ram. Now the harddrives have entered the "tera", a long way for CPU's and Ram to go to catch up.

RE: 1TB

By Master Kenobi

(blog) on 6/19/2007 2:48:20 PM , Rating: 2

Showing your age there man :)

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RE: 1TB

By TomZ on 6/19/2007 3:54:50 PM , Rating: 2

Geez, that's nothing - lots of us have programed 1MHz computers w/64KB of RAM, e.g., Commodore 64, as well as machines that came before it. And that's not even old, relatively speaking.

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More competition

By mdogs444 on 6/19/2007 12:37:20 PM , Rating: 2

Im glad there is finally more competition to bring the prices down!

But after seeing those external 500gb WD drives for $96, it'll be a long time before I spend $400 on a 1TB.

RE: More competition

By PrimarchLion on 6/19/2007 1:25:05 PM , Rating: 3

Hopefully if you don't buy one pretty soon, you'll never spend $400 on a 1TB hard drive =)

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Typo?

By AcAuroRa on 6/19/2007 2:08:49 PM , Rating: 3

The news piece says 7200.11, yet the table chart below the newsline reads "7200.10".

The 3 Platter Samsung hopefully will fare better in noise and thermals vs the other offerings. Now the question becomes then if the 16MB cache will really make a dent =[

RE: Typo?

By KristopherKubicki

(blog) on 6/19/2007 2:45:50 PM , Rating: 2

You're right. Our mistake.

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0.39??!?!

By Visual on 6/20/2007 3:12:12 AM , Rating: 3

how the *beep* do you get 0.39 when you divide 400 to the nicely round 1000GB?
and as a matter of fact, their actual capacity is less than 1000GB, so the price is even higher than 0.40/GB

RE: 0.39??!?!

By MattCoz on 6/22/2007 3:55:57 AM , Rating: 2

He must have divided 400 by 1024.

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nice

By yacoub on 6/19/2007 12:46:37 PM , Rating: 2

Thanks for noting the platters and density. That's very important in a purchase decision. Less platters/heads and more density = better performance, less moving parts to fail, less heat generated, etc. Good stuff. If only the Samsung had the 32MB cache... =)

RE: nice

By lplatypus on 6/25/2007 9:16:06 PM , Rating: 2

No!
More density = better performance per head, but this is balanced by having less heads. The net impact is that you have no change to performance as a result of number of platters.
Notice that #heads * density is constant (2000) for all three drives.
Performance aside, I second your vote of thanks for this information though :-)

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Samsung - please release a 2x334GB drive

By Kaleid on 6/19/2007 1:00:56 PM , Rating: 2

I would love to have two of them.

RE: Samsung - please release a 2x334GB drive

By Rebel44 on 6/19/2007 6:28:17 PM , Rating: 2

with 32MB cache and 10000RPM - I would buy such HDD in ASAP.

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Size and Tech

By mbehna on 6/19/2007 11:22:51 PM , Rating: 1

I have to ask: When a drive fails due to a head crash, do all the heads crash at the same time or is it typically just one? The reason I ask is, if the one head crashes, you are likely to lose less data with drives that use more platters due to lower areal density.

Additionally, I was reviewing the tech sheets for the Seagate and the Hitachi and noticed that Seagate uses CSS (Contact Start-Stop) whereas Hitachi uses Ramp Load/Unload which is claimed to be safer.

Performance-wise, the reviews for the Hitachi 1TB seem to indicate that the 32MB buffer was more of advantage and the 5 platter design was not so disadvantageous.

RE: Size and Tech

By masher2

(blog) on 6/19/2007 11:58:32 PM , Rating: 3

> "The reason I ask is, if the one head crashes, you are likely to lose less data with drives that use more platters due to lower areal density..."

But since those drives have more heads, the chance of any single one failing is higher. So (assuming all else is equal) the average chance of losing any single bit remains the same, no matter whether you have one platter or five.

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The Real Story...

By Rocket321 on 6/19/2007 12:57:17 PM , Rating: 2

To me; the part of this story that is most exciting is that Samsung managed to cram 334GB Per platter on their drive. This could mean a big drop in prices for the 320gb drive market.