[DM-MUG] Internal Hard Drives shopping

[Matthew Nuzum]

On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 2:54 PM, Victoria L. Herring <VLH at herringlaw.com> wrote:
> I sent back the Seagates and am now looking at Hitachi 1TB drives [Desk,
> Ultra, etc Star].  On pricegrabber.com I found four, all 1TB, 3 of which had
> 4* reviews so I'd probably at least start there. All  three are ATA-300,
> 7200RPM, 32mb buffer..they each have different part numbers.
>
> How the heck does one, when these specs are all the same, decide whether 3
> seemingly equivalent drives, all with 4* ratings, are different?  And why
> the price differential?
>
> The Ultrastar is more expensive but it says it is for enterprise use and has
> a 5 year warranty

There are two things that are not easily measured by stats. I'm sorry
that I haven't used the Hitatchi drives in a while so I'm not up on
which models to pick, but here are the two things you're missing:

MTBF: This is a rating showing how many hours of user the drive is
expected to work before failing. Mean Time Between Failure. Enterprise
drives are meant for servers and workstations that need to be
resilient and be in constant use 24 hours a day 7 days a week. They
have more durable components and have more metal in them (which allows
them to spread heat out).

Firmware: It's possible that this website where you are shopping has
made a good buy and can offer three drives which normally would have a
price difference for the same price. Often times there is a consumer
drive meant to be sold inexpensively and then a performance model
which may differ only in the firmware. One notable feature you often
get in the performance line is "NCQ" which can make a dramatic
difference in speed by optimizing the order in which data is written
the drive.  If you're into computer science NCQ is a fascinating
subject. Often times the inexpensive or "personal/home use" drives are
optimized for quiet operation instead of maximum performance. Because
the parts are the same and only the firmware differs it's not too
surprising to find the drives for the same price. It actually kind of
irritates me when there's an "artificial markup" in these situations.

-- 
Matthew Nuzum
newz2000 on freenode, skype, linkedin, identi.ca and twitter