Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 in RAID 0: Is Two Terabytes really better than One?
by Gary Key on April 19, 2007 12:15 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Final Thoughts
If it is not obvious by now, RAID 0 will provide outstanding results in synthetic benchmarks but really does nothing in actual applications. We should probably clarify that statement in detail. Utilizing the best performing drives in RAID 0 is the setup to have if you are looking to publish top benchmark scores with results in PCMark05 improving by 25% as an example. That same setup will provide you with at best minimal performance improvements in most applications, or sometimes no difference at all.
Our only meaningful application performance improvement with RAID 0 came in the Nero Recode tests where the improved write performance reduced our encoding process by about 5%. What will that 5% cost you? In this case, $399 for the second 7K1000, a halving of the mean time between failure rates on each drive, a data backup nightmare, and increases in noise, thermals, and power consumption. RAID 0 sounds impressive in a system configuration and provides a performance placebo effect when viewing synthetic benchmarks. However, RAID 0 is just not worth the trouble or cost for the average desktop user or gamer, especially with the software RAID capabilities included on most motherboards. We will delve into the RAID world with additional tests and hardware combinations in the coming weeks but for now we again recommend that most desktop users should just stay away from it.
Now that we have answered what happens if two of these impressive drives are operated in RAID 0, we can get back to our conclusions about the performance of this drive. Our experiences over the past few weeks with the Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 have been terrific. The overall performance of this drive is excellent and close enough to the WD1500ADFD Raptor drive that we consider it a worthy adversary in most situations. The Raptors are still the drives to own for most benchmarking purposes or those simply wanting the best overall performance in a SATA drive regardless of price or capacity, but the reduced capacity and higher noise levels are certainly a drawback.
We consider the Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 the best 7200rpm drive we have tested to date. This is quite the accomplishment considering this is Hitachi's first 3.5" form factor drive that utilizes perpendicular recording technology. We found the write performance and sustained transfer rates to be excellent and class leading in several of our test results. The drive also offers a very balanced blend of performance across a wide variety of business and home applications. The 7K1000 even has the best overall thermal and acoustic characteristics of the high performance 7200rpm drives in our tests. For these reasons, we award the Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 our Gold Editors' Choice award and highly recommend the purchase of this drive if you are currently looking for a high-capacity drive with performance to match.
The Deskstar 7K1000 is not without faults as we stated in our first article. We did find in our Nero Recode tests and to some degree in our Winstone tests that the drive does not perform as expected in handling large block sizes of data in sequential order. Conversely, the Achilles heel of the Seagate 750GB drive was its inability to handle large files in non-sequential order. Hitachi has overcome this for this most part with a large 32MB cache and from all apparent indications firmware that is tuned with operational balance in mind or even favoring non-sequential read/writes. This is a luxury it can afford due to its cache size and areal density advantages over the other drives in our test group.
Hitachi's implementation of their Automatic Acoustic Management technology on the 7K1000 does not hinder performance in a noticeable manner and offers a significant advantage for those needing a spacious drive in a quiet system. While our original acoustic testing shows the drive to be very quiet, it is not totally silent. However, based on conversations with Hitachi we fully expect the CinemaStar version of this drive (designed for DVR operations) to improve upon the Deskstar results. As stated in both articles, we believe leaving AAM and NCQ turned on provides the best user experience with this drive. While there may be a very slight performance advantage in certain benchmarks with AAM off, we feel like the benefit of having a quiet 1TB drive in our system is well worth the price of losing a few benchmark points.
If it is not obvious by now, RAID 0 will provide outstanding results in synthetic benchmarks but really does nothing in actual applications. We should probably clarify that statement in detail. Utilizing the best performing drives in RAID 0 is the setup to have if you are looking to publish top benchmark scores with results in PCMark05 improving by 25% as an example. That same setup will provide you with at best minimal performance improvements in most applications, or sometimes no difference at all.
Our only meaningful application performance improvement with RAID 0 came in the Nero Recode tests where the improved write performance reduced our encoding process by about 5%. What will that 5% cost you? In this case, $399 for the second 7K1000, a halving of the mean time between failure rates on each drive, a data backup nightmare, and increases in noise, thermals, and power consumption. RAID 0 sounds impressive in a system configuration and provides a performance placebo effect when viewing synthetic benchmarks. However, RAID 0 is just not worth the trouble or cost for the average desktop user or gamer, especially with the software RAID capabilities included on most motherboards. We will delve into the RAID world with additional tests and hardware combinations in the coming weeks but for now we again recommend that most desktop users should just stay away from it.
Now that we have answered what happens if two of these impressive drives are operated in RAID 0, we can get back to our conclusions about the performance of this drive. Our experiences over the past few weeks with the Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 have been terrific. The overall performance of this drive is excellent and close enough to the WD1500ADFD Raptor drive that we consider it a worthy adversary in most situations. The Raptors are still the drives to own for most benchmarking purposes or those simply wanting the best overall performance in a SATA drive regardless of price or capacity, but the reduced capacity and higher noise levels are certainly a drawback.
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The Deskstar 7K1000 is not without faults as we stated in our first article. We did find in our Nero Recode tests and to some degree in our Winstone tests that the drive does not perform as expected in handling large block sizes of data in sequential order. Conversely, the Achilles heel of the Seagate 750GB drive was its inability to handle large files in non-sequential order. Hitachi has overcome this for this most part with a large 32MB cache and from all apparent indications firmware that is tuned with operational balance in mind or even favoring non-sequential read/writes. This is a luxury it can afford due to its cache size and areal density advantages over the other drives in our test group.
Hitachi's implementation of their Automatic Acoustic Management technology on the 7K1000 does not hinder performance in a noticeable manner and offers a significant advantage for those needing a spacious drive in a quiet system. While our original acoustic testing shows the drive to be very quiet, it is not totally silent. However, based on conversations with Hitachi we fully expect the CinemaStar version of this drive (designed for DVR operations) to improve upon the Deskstar results. As stated in both articles, we believe leaving AAM and NCQ turned on provides the best user experience with this drive. While there may be a very slight performance advantage in certain benchmarks with AAM off, we feel like the benefit of having a quiet 1TB drive in our system is well worth the price of losing a few benchmark points.
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photoguy99 - Thursday, April 19, 2007 - link
You have tested XP 32-bit which uses the "ScsiPort" storage system.This artificially limits results using Raid.
Vista 32, Vista x64, and XP x64 all use the "StorPort" storage system, which is much faster and doesn't limit Raid results.
You could add 4 or 8 drives in Raid 0 and your transfer rates would not change much.
This should really be part of the discussion for the article.
yyrkoon - Thursday, April 19, 2007 - link
Funny that, last time I personally did a dirrect comparrison of a 3xRAID0 array in Vista, it was 30-40MB/s slower comparred to the same array in XP Pro.Nothing changed, only the OS.
photoguy99 - Thursday, April 19, 2007 - link
Perhaps in your case the Vista driver was not as optimized as the XP driver or was not using storport.However, it is absolutely invalid to benchmark raid performance on XP 32-bit if your goal is to test hardware rather than OS specific results.
Microsoft reference:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms803198....">http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms803198....
AllanLim - Thursday, April 19, 2007 - link
http://kakaku.com/item/05300415786/">http://kakaku.com/item/05300415786/Along with every other pc component, this probably comes at 20-30% premium compared to Stateside when it becomes available, but at least you can but it here.
Myrandex - Thursday, April 19, 2007 - link
Two 250GB drives in Raid 0. I dunno, I still feel that it helps with some load times on large maps on games and large numbers of file transfers at once, but I could be full of it. I do keep an off disk backup though that is pretty current.Jason
Sunrise089 - Thursday, April 19, 2007 - link
Sorry to double-post, but the end of the article says:" As stated in both articles, we believe leaving AAM and NCQ turned provides the best user experience with this drive."
I think there should be an "on" or "off" after "turned".
Sunrise089 - Thursday, April 19, 2007 - link
I have a long-running arguement with another PC enthusiest about the relative merit of RAID 0. Some people just cannot get it through their heads that no matter how great the idea sounds, the performance just isn't justified by the cost. At all. With video card price/performance scaling perfectly, and CPU and memory scaling at least OK, it's insane to spend hundreds of dollars on a second hard drive and gain a few percentage points in real-world tests. Thanks Anandtech for keeping the real-world focus of these articles.mesyn191 - Saturday, April 21, 2007 - link
Depends how its done...These software RAID controllers (yes NVRAID, Intel Matrix RAID, Silicon Image 3112/4 etc, Promise, Highpoint are all software RAID controllers that often act more like storage subsystem DE-celerators and often slow things down...) that Anandtech keeps using to demonstrate the pointlessness of RAID 0 really only prove how crappy software RAID controllers are. If you use a "real" enterprise class RAID controller that has a dedicated CPU and significant cache you'll see some real world performance improvements, even with doing things like loading games which is a far from ideal work load for RAID 0. The problem is most of these "real" RAID controllers tend to cost ~$300, and that is for a cheap one, high end versions can easily cost thousands of dollars and most people don't want to spend that much on storage. Most of these enterprise class controllers also tend to have issues working with desktop motherboards, they're really meant for use in server motherboards and so they won't even boot up properly in alot of them, just read up on all the issues people tend to have getting the Areca 1210 (probably the most commonly used enterprise class RAID card in the enthusiast PC crowd) PCIe RAID cards working in commodity consumer grade motherboards.
Of course another nice thing about those enterprise class RAID controllers is most of them support multiple levels of RAID at the same time, so you can have a RAID 0 set and a RAID 5 set on the same bunch of hard drives, providing you a good way to safe guard your data and get a performance benefit.
PenGun - Friday, April 20, 2007 - link
K .... maybe you can tell me how I'm gonna get a solid write of 150MB/sec any other way. My camera in HD SDI needs to move that much data.RAID 0 or perhaps RAID 5 (to be tested soon) is the only way. 4 Western Digital 500G drives is my way of handling that fire hose of data.
Oh go back to your games it really does not matter, it's just my problem right now. It is my desktop when it's full. It's easier to crunch the massive files in situ.
yyrkoon - Thursday, April 19, 2007 - link
Some people just can not seem to get it through their heads, that not everyone plays games, or surfs the web, on a home desktop PC. Video editing applications that require 65MB/s substained transfers rates, will require either a very fast disk, or two lesser drives striped.
Since most enterprise drives cost an arm and a leg, I think running RAID0 for this application, or something that NEEDS the throughput justifies the cost. Now, I personally DO run RAID0 on my home desktop, and I think it is more than justified, but I do not expect it to work wonders, and I definately know, it will not make my system boot faster, will not make a First Person Shooter faster (except, perhaps level load times, which is pretty much moot).
Now, Imagine spending 2x $400 for RAID1 . . . that is what I call a waste of money, although, with these hitachi drives, who knows how reliable they are. The point here, being, you can not tell anyone what they need, or want in a desktop, because you really have not a clue what they really need / want. This being said, RAID0 for most people probably is overkill.