1 Terabyte recording drive? too large?

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LemonTree

LemonTree

Suck 'em and see!
Is 1T too large for recording as far as seek times goes?

I seen a great deal on 1T WD CAviar green 32MB cache SATA2

I've had a few maxtor and seagate drives crap out on me over the past couple of years. What's everyone's thoughts? Should I be sticking to 500GB drives? or is that a thing of the past?
 
Do you have that in a smaller size?

I have a terabyte drive, but use a 500 Gig drive for most everything and the big drive for a library. I've had good luck with LaCie external drives.
 
Hard drives suck. Large drives doubly so. Keep regular backups.

As for the other question, seek times and capacity are largely independent. Seek times consist of three factors: the rotational latency (which is determined by the rotation speed), the track seek time (which is determined by how quickly the arm can move and is somewhat dependent on the diameter of the drive plater), and the settle time.

Of these, the speed of the drive rotation isn't tied to capacity at all. They give that in RPM as one of the major specs of a hard drive, e.g. 5400 RPM, 7200 RPM....

Similarly, the speed at which the head arm moves is not capacity-dependent; platters on modern HDs are pretty much all either 1", 1.8", 2.5", or 3.5", and drives with one platter size aren't interchangeable with drives of a different size without serious adapters, so you can pretty much ignore this factor as well. There are differences in the seek speed of different mechanisms, sure, but they aren't related to the capacity in any real way.

This leaves settle time. For short seeks, this dominates. You're mostly doing short seeks. Therefore, this is at least a bit important.

Higher capacity is achieved either by adding more platters or by increasing the density.

Increasing the number of platters should have no real impact on settle time whatsoever, though it may make overall performance faster to some degree if the fractional-track seeks are exceptionally fast (which is usually the case) as it means that there is more data available without doing a seek.

Increased density may increase the settle time a tiny bit, but overall, generally improves performance, again, by reducing the average number of seeks needed to read a given amount of near-contiguous data.

The thing is, the density-caused settle penalty is basically lost in the noise---it is likely to be severely overshadowed by the extra throughput gained from the density increase that necessitates the more precise head placement.

In short, I wouldn't worry about the seek performance. I'd worry instead about how you're going to back up a drive that big. :)
 
Very informative DG, thanks for that.

I have a WD Caviar 250GB system disk right now and a 500GB Seagate baracuda recording drive which I'm retiring. I back up every project to an external 500GB drive as well as burning a hard copy of each to DVD.

I think I'll keep the 500GB drive as a library disk and add another WD Caviar 250G for recording on
 
Maybe I am wrong about this, but I was always under the impression that the more important factor was sustained throughput and not actual seek times.
 
In short, I wouldn't worry about the seek performance. I'd worry instead about how you're going to back up a drive that big. :)

The best way to back up a drive that big is to buy a second drive the same size, and use something like Ghost to copy the entire drive on a regular schedule.
 
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