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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MadAd - Saturday, April 21, 2007 - link
<quote>Sorry but saving even 5 secs out of 10, 5 times a day is not work the extra money to me</quote>I take it you dont play battlefield 2 then. Having just two or three seconds advantage on each mapchange can mean the difference between a round flying a jet or helo, or a few seconds later watching everyone else fly off and being left with a humvee (if you are very lucky) or nothing at all.
Of course not all games have this problem however with bf2 when there are 32 players a side and only 2 jets each then its the quickest in that gets first picks, and if it takes running raid 0 just to pick up that extra second or two, then so be it.
ShadowdogKGB - Saturday, April 21, 2007 - link
My four little Hitachi 80gigs in R0 will load the single player Daging Oilfields in 18-20 seconds. Hows that for real world performance. Or maybe somebody from the church of the anti-raid can explain that away for me. My point of contention from this article is that the author went out of his way to denigrate the concept of raid. And another point is that you don't buy a 1 terabyte hard drives just to put them in raid, and especially put them in raid 0. These babies are for storage. You're definitely are not going to want 2 Terabytes of data sitting on a fragile Raid 0. No, this article is just plain skewed. Now there's gonna be a bunch of knuckle heads pointing to these benchmarks and saying "See? See? I told you so!" Yeah, HL2 Lost Coast. That's not even a real game. And The Sims2? Oh please. Yeah that's real world performance figures right there. Bleh. I'm no programmer or mathematician but I could have done a more decent article on this subject than this amateur.Axbattler - Friday, April 20, 2007 - link
I do not buy the 'extra money' argument that much (**). It's not like performance is the only (*possible) gain from striping two drives. The second drive get you extra capacity, and as long as people choosing to go RAID-0 are using the extra space, then they are not paying a financial premium over buying two drives and running them separately (unless they need to purchase a RAID controller). To me, the main cost from going RAID-0, is the added risk in case of failure.* Though I am in the school of thought that RAID-0, do not provide significant performance boost in the majority of the cases, I do find gains more often than penalties (from overhead).
Regarding from the article results, I am not surprised by the game loading results. I do, however suspect that the performance benefit of RAID-0 may be more noticeable in XP boot up time however (whether that is important enough, I'll shrug to it. Not my cash).
The file copy result make me wonder if there is not a bottleneck elsewhere though.
7.55 *1024 / 100 = 77.312 MB/sec on average. That's the transfer rate of a single drive.
** I do make an exception to people stripping Raptor's. I can't think of many desktop users who have enough 'performance sensive' applications (OS, apps, games - as opposed to multimedia files for instance) they use regularly - so much that they would need a second Raptor in the same rig. I do suspect that those users are really going for the bragging right rather than the 'free performance'.
Lastly, I wonder if RAM Disks, in their current form, are really faster the fastest SCSI drives at loading games. I seem to remember benchies of i-RAM some time ago showing it to edge the 150GB Raptor by not that much.
Griswold - Thursday, April 19, 2007 - link
Absolutely agree. The only winner is the storage industry.gramboh - Thursday, April 19, 2007 - link
No kidding, been waiting for the Seagate for a while. It will also be nice to see 250GB platters (x4) on a 1TB drive. I'm running 2x 7200.10 500's right now and am happy with them. I'd like 1TB to come out to push drive costs down so I use a few for external back-up.BoberFett - Thursday, April 19, 2007 - link
Anybody who stripes drives of this size is asking to lose a lifetime's worth of data. Even assuming it's data than can be reassembled such as ripped or downloaded music and movies, the time required to reassemble that data is pretty significant.goinginstyle - Thursday, April 19, 2007 - link
Glad to see you guys still telling it like it is with RAID 0. I am just waiting on the comments to come in from people who swear it lets them operate their systems at light speed. This drive seems to be really nice but I will wait for the Seagate 1TB to come out before making an upgrade decision. When is it coming out?Gary Key - Thursday, April 19, 2007 - link
The Seagate 1TB drives are due out in four to six weeks according to the last information we had from them.