Hitachi Global Storage
Technologies

After buying IBM's drive division a few years back, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies became a cutting edge drive company. Famous for its Microdrive technology (1.0" hard drives in a CompactFlash form factor), Endurastar drive family (operating temperatures from -20 to +85 Celsius), and pioneering research, Hitachi continues to be at the fore of diverse PC storage solutions.

Travelstar Goes Far Hitachi's Travelstar line is among the fastest of notebook drives with its 7,200 RPM spin rate and envelope-pushing capacities.

Unfortunately, the 7,200 RPM, 2.5", 100GB 7K100 drive was not available for review as of this writing, and the 5,400 RPM 5K100 drive Hitachi sent us to evaluate resulted in a blue screen of death every time we attempted to boot with it. However, we were able to get a taste for Hitachi's 2.5" performance with the 60GB, 7,200 RPM 7K60.

The drive's 7,200 RPM spin rate clearly shows an advantage for high-throughput applications, yielding the best results we saw from a 2.5" drive across every test. Interestingly, though, we were most intrigued when comparing the 7K60's results against Seagate's Momentus 5400.2. Seagate seems to be in no hurry to reach 7,200 RPM with the Momentus family (although a unit was announced in April with no firm arrival date), and now we see why. The advantage of 7,200 RPM is incremental at best, showing only a three-second gain in our 11GB transfer test. In HDTach's write test, Hitachi showed a roughly 7% performance gain over the Momentus. Because the 7K100 has yet to ship into the channel, we can't say what the price delta is between the two drives, but we have a hunch it will be significant.

The Half-Terabyte Gorilla Hitachi is the first to market with a 500GB desktop drive. We were more than impressed with its performance and unusually quiet running.

Hitachi hits another milestone here with the 7K500, the industry's first half-terabyte desktop drive. The 7K500 blew the roof off our PCMark benchmarks and showed predictably even performance against our Seagate and Western Digital desktop drives. Strangely, though, the 7K500 seemed to take a slight dip in HDTach results.

Some competing vendors advised us to be careful of the extra noise the 7K500's five-platter stack might generate, but Hitachi's built-in vibration dampeners did an admirable job of coping with this. Like most large capacity drives, though, the unit does get quite hot, so pay close attention to your thermals if trying to build a high storage solution in a thin or SFF chassis.

Iomega

While not an actual drive manufacturer, Iomega remains one of the best examples of what a solutions manufacturer can devise using disk technology. The REV is a 35GB native (90GB compressed) drive and removable cartridge product based on housing a 2.5" disk platter in each cartridge. The good news with this format is that as 2.5" platters continue to scale up in capacity, new cartridges will be fully backward compatible with the REV drive. Iomega positions the REV against tape backup products, and at 35/90GB, we're guessing Iomega means Travan- and DAT72-class tape. All formats of the drive (ours was the USB 2.0 version) ship with system and backup software.

REV cartridges sport a shelf life in excess of 30 years, a service life of five years, and a cycle rating of 2,000 insertions and removals. As is typical of Iomega products, users pay a hefty premium per megabyte for storage, but the format's robustness and scalability make amends. After all, we'd rather drop a REV cartridge than a 2.5"-based external hard drive any day. REV cartridges have higher shock tolerance, and in the event of damage, one REV cartridge is much cheaper to replace than an entire external drive. Not least of all, external 2.5"-based drives might have capacities of 80GB or 100GB, but you can back up several hundred gigabytes with a REV by just swapping in more cartridges.

Best Thing Since the Zip Iomega's REV plants a 2.5" 35GB platter inside of a compact, removable cartridge. The REV thus delivers high performance with unlimited backup capacity.

Iomega uses a special UDF file format with the REV that prohibits deletion of the cartridge's partition. As such,Thus we were unable to test the drive under h2benchw or HDTach RW. As with other external storage devices that don't show up in My Computer as a hard disk drive volume, PCMark 2004 would not see the REV. So all we had to go on for performance was our uncompressed transfer tests. Iomega's results are competitive and in fact superior to the transfer times we saw with the Western Digital and Seagate 2.5" external units. This is even more impressive considering that REV cartridges use a 4,200 RPM spindle speed.

VARs should keep in mind that Iomega also offers its REV Autoloader 1000 series with up to 700GB of compressed storage. This product is meant to tackle tape autoloaders in the same price class, and while tapes may be cheaper per gigabyte than REV cartridges, no tape can touch the REV Autoloader's 25MB/s transfer rates. Moreover, the random seeking inherent to hard disk technology makes individual file retriever dramatically faster than having to scan across a tape in a sequential fashion.

Maxtor

Over the last two years, Maxtor has driven like mad to be the king of the 3.5" drive in all possible niches, starting with desktop and SCSI drives, moving into midline PATA/SATA storage with the MaXLine series, igniting the external USB drive category almost single-handedly with the Personal Storage and OneTouch families, and most recently being first to market with a consumer network-attached storage device called the Shared Storage Drive.

As you can see, the Maxtor 300GB DiamondMax 10 performs right in line with the other 7,200 RPM 3.5" internal drives we tested, rising a bit above the pack with its faster burst rates. The 300GB model we tested sports a 16MB cache, sub-9.0ms average seek time, and native command queuing. Maxtor also equips the DiamondMax 10 with a proprietary dual-processor technology that works with the drive's firmware to balance workloads more efficiently in multitasking situations.

Our desktop-class test methodology doesn't provide for the rapid fire command requests for which NCQ is designed, but suffice it to say that a fault-tolerant array of DiamondMax 10s would make for an excellent high capacity RAID in low-end, high-transaction servers. For those needing the quality assurance of enterprise-class drives, the MaXLine III delivers an MTBF of one million hours as well as "SATA II" extension specs including hot plug, NCQ, and staggered spin-up.

DiamondMax 10 a Jewel While not the largest drive around, the DiamondMax 10 is plenty fast and sports an integrated processor for helping to boost performance in multi-tasking situations.

Those expecting the performance of an internal drive from an external product like the OneTouch II FireWire and USB, just because it houses the same drive, are in for a rude awakening as toabout the realities of USB and FireWire. This unit still features a 16MB cache, 9.0ms average seek, and 7,200 RPM spin rate, but the flatline in our HD Tach RW chart says it all. The interface is an inescapable bottleneck that throttles the drive to a certain performance ceiling. In theory, a USB 2.0 drive should be able to hit sustained throughput of 34MB/s, but after overhead and other factors the reality is closer to 26MB/s. This is why comparing external drives on performance should be the first thing you dissuade potential customers from doing.

Rather, the advantages of this Maxtor are its generous 300GB capacity, sexy anodized aluminum enclosure, one-touch backup functionality, and dual-format interfaces. (You'll see about 6Mb/s or 7Mb/s improvement with FireWire over USB 2.0, but we tested with USB here for consistency's sake across all of our external drives.) Maxtor was the first vendor to implement a front-mounted drive button that calls up a bundled backup application (Dantz Retrospect Express in this case), taking all of the confusing interface hassles away from consumers. With the OneTouch II, Maxtor lets users program the button to call up any executable program on the system. Of course, the backup software can also be set to run automatically according to an established schedule. The upshot is that this is a super-simple consumer backup solution that can be easily moved between PCs as needed without the trouble and expense of installing multiple internal backup drives.

The Shared Storage Drive is more or less a OneTouch II with two USB ports added and the USB/FireWire replaced with 10/100 Ethernet so that PCs from across the LAN can back up files to a central drive. The simplified user experience has been preserved thanks to Maxtor's brilliantly easy software. Quite literally, we had the Shared Storage Drive up and running from breaking the shrink wrap to storing files in under five minutes. Maxtor plants a drag-and-drop network drive icon on the Windows desktop so that users don't need to dig into My Computer or My Network Places. Speaking of which, the Shared Storage Drive also shows up in My Computer, a rarity for LAN-based drives but a very handy feature for novices. The twin USB ports allow for seamless addition of external storage (the drive shows up as a folder within the SSD) as well as print server functionality.

Most recently, Maxtor took the OneTouch II in another direction: the SMB server space. By the time you read this, the OneTouch II Small Business Edition drive (200GB native, 300GB compressed) should be available. This product is identical to the OneTouch II save that it is bundled with a special version of Dantz Retrospect capable of backing up Windows 2000 and 2003 Server systems. The Retrospect Express software will not do this, and Maxtor makes the SBE version a worthy bundle by wrapping the hardware and SBE software together for a much lower price than you could get them separately. As with the REV Autoloader, the OneTouch II SBE is a total tape killer for servers reaching up to 300GB.

OneTouch, Take II Maxtor's sexy external drive, the OneTouch II, comes in capacities up to 300GB and connects via USB 2.0 and (on combo units) 1394a. With an ultra-simple UI, this is great data add-on for consumers.

One last area within Maxtor's product lines that system builders targeting media center PCs shouldn't miss is the QuickView. At first glance, the QuickView drive family looks entirely forgettable: ATA/133 interface, 5,400 RPM, 2MB cache, and present capacities topping out at 300GB. Behind the scenes, though, Maxtor has worked to optimize the drive for digital entertainment applications. For example, most desktop drives are designed to work in temperatures up to 55 degrees Celsius. Because QuickView drives often go into boxes stuck in the back of a cabinet, piled under other hot electronics, Maxtor qualifies them to run at 70 degrees Celsius. A 2MB cache buffer is fine here because there is little need to cache a continuous video stream. The duty cycle is longer on QuickView drives because they're often on 24 x 7, and Maxtor includes onboard logic to assist with entertainment applications.

"With our built-in QuickView Dynamic Streaming, we can determine if the data coming to the drive is standard digital data or a stream format," says Maxtor's Lenny Sharpe, director of marketing for consumer electronics products. "We detect that and then hand the processing of that stream off to an onboard video processor. We have a RISC core on our PCB, and we're able to use that to improve the processing of video streams by 4X rather than just let the host processor do all the work."

Regardless of its looks in on paper, QuickView drives are rated to handle seven concurrent video streams, and a revision suitable for 10 streams is coming soon. This is so that integrators can use QuickView drives in media server boxes beaming video to multiple rooms simultaneously. The ability to handle multi-stream output will become increasingly important as consumer electronics start to incorporate FireWire ports over the next couple of years. According to Sharpe, since TV manufacturers are now integrating 1394 into their core logic, the incremental cost to add FireWire will be roughly zero by the end of 2006. Once TVs have this, system builders will be able to craft value-add PVR and media center systems that can travel along with the owner.

Samsung

Samsung is the dark horse of hard drives. The company entered the market with mainstream 3.5" drives and seemed to stay there for a very long time, only selling into OEM and channel markets, and ignoring retail completely. Rather than expend its resources trying to do a little of everything, Samsung concentrated on making the best possible drives for the competitive niche it had targeted—and succeeded. In addition to excellent performance, Samsung also offers a three-year warranty on all of its drives as well as a 48-hour swap end-users can request via toll-free phone support.

Samsung Coming Up Fast While Samsung has focused exclusively on 3.5" consumer drives, such as this SpinPoint P, the company is now broadening into 2.5" and other designs and grabbing market share.

The SpinPoint P drive we received, like most units, showed an even mix of strengths and weaknesses. With middle of the pack performance in our transfer tests, Samsung shows exceptionally good average read and write times in HD Tach and incredibly high burst speeds. In fact, this was the only SATA/300 drive we saw that demonstrated any benefit from its interface by surpassing a 150MB/s burst threshold. Conversely, the drive pulled up last in our h2bench application index, which simulates different popular application profiles, and PCMark 2004 but only barely so. Overall, we were quite pleased with the unit's performance and are anxious to see more diversity from Samsung's drive group.

"For the past five years, we've reinvested heavily into R&D and production," says Albert Kim, national sales manager for Samsung storage products. "As a result, according to IDC numbers for 2004, we were the fastest growing HDD company in the world, growing 54% at last report. So you will see a broader range of products from us going forward."

At present, Samsung is not pursuing SAS, but it did debut its first 2.5" drive back in January of 2004. In March of this year, Samsung was the first manufacturer to release SATA 3Gb/s drives into the channel in 160GB and 200GB capacities. A 250GB model should be available in June. To date, Samsung hasn't been very aggressive about promoting its 3Gb/s products, and some internal reorganization that left the hard drive division outside of Samsung's famed partner program didn't help this. However, Kim notes that this may change in the near future.

Seagate

While it may not dominate every storage market segment, Seagate remains the overall hard drive market share leader, offering storage products ranging from a 1.0" disk in its 5GB Pocket Drive to 15,000 RPM Fibre Channel drives to the external 400GB Pushbutton Backup. A couple of years ago, Seagate appeared determined to broaden its drive lines, focusing in particular on the new SATA interface. (In fact, Seagate was the only first-generation vendor with a native SATA solution, not a PATA-SATA bridge). Today, the company is lending a closer ear to customer demands.

"Over the last four or five years, we were seeing a real drop in higher capacity drives," says Seagate's Jeff Burke, "but I think with the popularization of video and audio in the consumer space, you're starting to see that change. Customers are moving to higher capacity drives."

Today, Seagate has 400GB internal and external drives, and a 500GB model will follow shortly. The company figured it was headed in the right direction when it developed a webinar on high-capacity drives and 40% of registrants showed up. Ten percent attendance is average. Moreover, despite the fact that 80GB drives are still the norm in corporate systems, early feedback from corporate clients is showing a rising trend toward high-cap nearline systems.

"We had a study group go out recently and asked IT managers what their requirements were going to be going forward for storage, and the response was very interesting," says Seagate's Desa Zraick, director of global channel programs and operations. "They started talking about how people want their information immediately in nearline storage, not buried in large, offline archives. And not only that, they want to be able to access their archives very quickly. So business is gradually waking up to high capacity. You'll start to see archived business content becoming richer, not just text and HTML. For instance, we archive all of our webinars for system builders. People are going to want to save richer content, and they're going to want fast access to it."

A Momentus Occasion Seagate was a bit late to the 2.5" party, but the 5400.2 makes amends with chart-topping scores, quiet operation, and very low power consumption.

One example of how Seagate is making such applications affordable for SMBs is the Barracuda 7200.8 internal 3.5" drive. This 7,200 RPM, 8MB cache, 1.5Gb/s SATA unit varies from the 7200.7 primarily in that it steps up from the older 80GB platters to 133GB platters. (Higher data density usually means shorter seek times.) This not only enables a theoretical jump in sustained throughput from 58MB/s to 65MB/s but it also means that you're getting 400GB from only three platters. Fewer platters should translate into lower heat output and power consumption, both key points in corporate array solutions. Like all Seagate drives, the 7200.8 comes with a five-year warranty.

The 400GB 7200.8 trails slightly in our 2GB transfer and PCMark 2004 HD tests, but the drive performs evenly with the competition on our 11GB test and posted the highest read speeds in HD Tach RW of any drive we evaluated, demonstrating the value of that higher areal density.

After an overlong time sitting at 160GB, Seagate revamped its External Hard Drive by supporting both USB 2.0 and 1394a connections and leaping all the way to a 400GB capacity. While not as aesthetically sleek as Maxtor's external, Seagate's design features a partly rubberized, stackable design that will appeal to serious storageaholics. We were stunned by the atypical (and repeated) performance of the 400GB External on our 2GB transfer test. All other benchmarks fell in line with Maxtor's OneTouch II. Like Maxtor, Seagate uses a one-touch backup button, includes backup software, and features an all-but-idiotproof Windows UI. We were also quite pleased when the 400GB External passed our inadvertent 12" drop test onto a hardwood floor with flying colors. Gotta love that extra care Seagate puts into shock resistance.

For those who want to take bountiful storage on the road, we have yet to find a better solution than Seagate's 100GB Portable Hard Drive. Smaller than a paperback book and based on a 5,400 RPM 2.5" disk drive, this USB 2.0 life saver has only one drawback: The current first-generation version requires the special bundled USB cable in order to run from data line power. Every other USB cable we tried would not work with the drive.

Portable Done Right Bigger than most internal desktop drives but small enough to slip in a jacket pocket, Seagate's 100GB Portable External Hard Drive is built to run fast and, thanks to its novel aluminum enclosure, stay cooler than competing portables.

Forgiving that, the Portable was exceptional, posting slight to noticeable performance gains against Western Digital's Passport across the board. The 100GB Seagate model uses an 8MB cache, puts out a practically inaudible 23 dB during operation, and features 5,000 Gs of non-operational shock resistance. The device still too large for a pocket but slips unobtrusively into any laptop bag or briefcase and weighs a mere 10.3 ounces.

The other Seagate 100GB drive we saw was the 2.5" ATA/100 Momentus 5400.2, which is now fairly middle of the road for Seagate's mobile drive line. (The faster 7200.1 also comes in a 100GB flavor, and the Momentus 5400.2 now reaches up to 120GB in both PATA and SATA.) Of the four 5,400 RPM drives we tested, Seagate only finds competition from Fujitsu's PATA model. And like Fujitsu, Seagate has revamped its onboard logic to provide for lower power consumption. The Momentus never offered so much as an audible click during our testing. With an operating shock rating of 250 Gs (900 Gs non-operating), you can't beat this unit for inclusion in your whitebook designs.

In fact, whitebooks are an escalating concern priority at Seagate, as evidenced by the company's www.whitebookbuilder.com site. Just around the corner, look for Seagate to announce integrated security in its Momentus line, and 2.5" SAS is on the immediate roadmap, as well.

We also remain impressed by Seagate's commitment to foster and motivate the reseller channel. On top of the regular eval unit discounts offered through the Seagate Partner Program, the company is offering free demo drives in its high capacity and 2.5" lines so that system builders can see for themselves the products' competitive advantages. Seagate continues to do popular bundle rebate deals on desktop drives with Intel motherboards, and you'll soon see Seagate rolling out a disk disaster recovery service that channel partners will be able to resell. This is pass-through business, essentially referral commissions paid to the reseller for pushing recovery business to Seagate's recovery partner.

"The cross-sell opportunity with the data recovery is significant," notes Zraick. "So many small businesses don't back up their data. When an independent insurance agent is out there and his system crashes, he freaks out. Data recovery is important to him. But what's equally important that he didn't know before his crash but that our resellers will be able to capitalize on is that he can have a one-touch 300GB backup drive—and it's a Seagate drive, the same kind that's in his notebook. You can cross-sell that alongside the data recovery."

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