problems with Hitachi 1TB SATA drives

[Oliver Fromme]

Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
 > * Hard disks are growing in capacity, but are not growing in physical
 > size.  We're pushing 1TB in a 3.5" form factor.  And the same applies to
 > laptop (2.5") drives.  The margin of error continues to increase as we
 > try to cram more and more data in such a small medium.  I personally
 > would *love* to see drives go back to using a 5.25" form factor,
 > especially for large capacity disks, since chances are it means higher
 > reliability (read: less chance of error).

As far as reliability goes, I agree.

However, the problem is, you cannot make 5.25" disks spin
at 10 or 15 krpm.  Well, maybe you can, but it's a hell of
an engineering problem.  Even 7200 rpm isn't trivial to do
for such large discs.  And who wants to buy a slow 3600 rpm
5.25" drive?  Apart from that, the larger radius also means
slower end-to-end movement for the heads.

 > * All this leads me to the topic of backups.  Hard disks are growing in
 > capacity at a rate which the backup industry cannot follow.  It's
 > getting to the point where you have to buy hard drives to back up the
 > data on other hard drives, but anyone with half a brain knows RAID is
 > not a replacement for backups.

Correct, RAID and backups are completely different.  But
you can use disk drives for both.

I solved my backup problem by putting a hot-swap ATA frame
into my home server (they're pretty cheap nowadays), and
using a bunch of ATA disks as removable media.  It's just
like tape backups, but much cheaper, faster and easier to
use.  It beats every tape technology hands down.

 > going to sit around once a week backing up a terabyte of data to ~120
 > dual-layer 8.5GB DVDs?

I wouldn't even start thinking about considering that.

 > The closest thing out there right now is
 > a product from IOMega called REV, which (at most) offers 70GB of storage
 > per disk, or 140GB with compression.
 > 
 > A new IOMega REV (which includes one 70GB disk) costs US$600 MSRP.  You
 > read that right.

Ugh.  For US$600 you get four 400 GB disk drives, including
four trays and one frame (hot-swap capable).  That's 1.6 TB
of backup capacity.  Compare that to 70 GB.  I also guess
that that "REV" thing is much slower than an ATA disk.

Best regards
   Oliver

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