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Hard Drive Sales Are Growing Almost As Fast As Capacities

Justin Kerr — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 15:23:16 -0500

Marketing research firm iSuppli has reported on the status of the hard drive industry, and from the sounds of it, we just can’t get enough storage. In the first quarter of 2008, hard drive vendors shipped over 137 million units in a seemingly futile attempt to satiate consumer’s appetites for inexpensive storage. Despite the 21 percent increase in sales over the same period last year, many HDD vendors such as Seagate continue to struggle. iSuppli speculates that lower prices and a disproportionate demand for lower margin desktop drives are to blame. This is a trend that is likely to continue as SSD’s continue to plummet in price and become the storage medium of choice for mobile devices mainly due to its durability. Despite the challenges conventional hard drive makers face in the mobile market, iSuppli is forecasting strong demand in the second quarter with shipments estimated to be up by as much as 16 percent over 2007. Seagate continues to lead the pack with profits of $363 million, followed by Western Digital at $298 million, and Hitachi at $65 million. This is excellent news specifically for Hitachi who has been struggling to pull itself out of the red. So has our insatiable appetite for digital media made mass storage devices recession proof?

Click the jump and let us know what you think.

Samsung HD103UJ Terabyte Drive

David Murphy — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 11:51:45 -0500

Performance scores are one thing, but we’re equally impressed by Samsung’s technical accomplishment in achieving the highest areal density to date on its new series of Spinpoint F1 drives. And at the top of the heap sits the HD103UJ, the company’s long-awaited drive that reaches an areal density of an astonishing 334GB per platter.

That’s right. The HD103UJ sports a three-platter array, much to the likely embarrassment of its competitors in the high-capacity storage arena. Hitachi’s first-to-the-market 7K1000 drive has five platters, while terabyte offerings from Western Digital and Seagate split the difference at four. What’s the benefit of this increased areal density? In a word: speed.

Samsung’s drive destroys all other terabyte models in many of the mission-critical benchmarks we run, including tests for average reads, writes, and real-world performance. HD Tach’s synthetic tests show the drive achieving read speeds of nearly 100MB/s, with write speeds swimming along at 84.4MB/s. On the real-world side, Hitachi’s Deskstar 7K1000 cruised to victory in three of our five PCMark05 tests: an XP startup simulation, application loading, and general use, but the HD103UJ’s excellent write capabilities—it’s 14MB/s faster than the Deskstar, as reported by HD Tach—helped it overtake the Deskstar by almost 300 points on the overall score.

The HD103UJ produced the slowest random access times of the three compared drives, but the effects of this and the drive’s slower burst speeds were never apparent during our real-world tests. Hands-down, this is the fastest terabyte drive we have tested.

Seagate Barracuda 7200.11

David Murphy — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 15:25:08 -0600

With new teams entering the terabyte storage market, it was only a matter of time before one smacked down the great Hitachi 7K1000 1TB drive. That distinction goes to Seagate’s 1TB Barracuda 7200.11 drive.

The Barracuda and Western Digital’s Caviar GP are virtually identical in terms of features: same 32MB cache, same 7,200rpm rotation speed, same 512 bytes per sector. The Barracuda and Caviar GP drives also use four platters (250GB apiece) to hit their 1TB capacities, unlike Hitachi’s 7K1000, which uses five platters. This difference in areal density proves to be a fatal flaw for Hitachi’s drive, and the Caviar GP’s speeds are constrained by its focus on energy savings.

The result? Seagate’s 7200.11 terabyte drive is the fastest we’ve yet tested in the Lab, hands down. It doesn’t come with any additional features—no encryption, no power-savings, no backup—just speed. Although we’d welcome the others, speed is our primary concern.

Western Digital Caviar GP

David Murphy — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 14:25:08 -0600

We’ve been waiting with bated breath for Western Digital’s entrance into the world of the almighty terabyte. Its Caviar GP drive may have lost the right to stand at the top of the market and yell, “Firsties!” but it is the only terabyte drive built with energy-savings in mind.

The four-platter drive features a number of functions that aim to reduce the drive’s total power consumption: The drive modulates its rotational speeds between 5,400rpm and 7,200rpm, unloads the heads when the drive is idle, and smooths out the normally jittery motions of the actuator in an attempt to minimize wasted juice.

It sounded like junk science to us too, until we compared the power-consumption levels of a Caviar GP–based rig to those of an identical setup that uses Hitachi’s 7K1000. A power analyzer confirmed that our Caviar GP rig drew from 7 to 10 fewer watts on average. For a computer that runs at idle all day long, that translates to about 61.32 kilowatt-hours per year. Assuming you’re paying roughly 10 cents per kilowatt hour, a Caviar GP could save you about $6 a year—just enough for a feast at Taco Bell.

The Caviar GP holds its own performance-wise. As expected, though, the drive’s emphasis on power-saving costs it a little bit in the speed department. Although improved areal density over Hitachi’s 7K1000 helps bridge the gap between the two drives, the Caviar GP still falls short of the 7K1000’s impressive read speeds. Of the three terabyte drives we’ve tested, the Caviar GP is the slowest by far.