Background:

There is no question hard drive technology has greatly improved in recent years, with which consumers benefit the most. It is not just speed and capacity, but also good value for consumers. 80GB hard drives in 2003 cost the same if not more than a 500GB today while the 300GB was priced similar two year ago.

Document data does not take much hard drive space if you are running an office in a medium size company. Other than the “crazy” covering your “behind” type of emails and their attachments, I found no more than 100 megabytes of worthy enough data to be kept after 30 years of working in mid/upper management positions.

However, things begin to change greatly in the last two years. I managed to get a 4GB SanDisk Sansa MP3 player to store some of my favorite songs, but photos from ever increasing Mega Pixel cameras begin to come in from everyone in the family thanks to the drastic drop in digital camera price of late. Worst of all, video clips from vacation, new born, new cars and birthdays take up the most room before you have the time to burn them into DVD. Admittedly, I do keep several good DVD movies in my HDD in any given time due to my lazy nature. Suddenly, I found my 250GB hard drive struggling for elbow room. I no longer “laugh at” people in need of high capacity HDDs.

Western Digital, Maxtor, IBM (now Hitachi) and Seagate are the common names in the industry. The nice folks from Geeks Computer Parts sent us two refurbished 500GB Seagate hard drives for evaluation.

Introduction :

If you have worked on PC long enough you know the life expectancy of a hard drive varies. Personally speaking, I have had really bad luck with IBM Deskstar five years ago, three failures within a 15-month time frame; two Western Digital both lasted over two years. I don't recall any of my HDD failure since 1988 other than what I've mentioned.

Return Material Requesition (RMA) turn-around time improves from my first return in 2001 to 2005 when the last one took only 10 days. It means from the day I mailed in the defective drive to receiving a replacement on the 10th day while it took about 4 weeks back in 2001. I notice the improvement came from having inventory in the U.S. rather than shipping the replacement from offshore factories which could be anywhere from Eastern Europe to Southern Asia.

Not all RMA'ed returns are due to defective products. As more and more DIY weekend builders assembling their one of the kind PC, there are more returns from inexperienced beginners fail to setup motherboard BIOS and or OS properly. A common one I notice is this, "My 300 GB X-brand hard drive only recognized by Windows setup as 137 GB, so I returned it". I am sure returns from broken SATA connector ranks pretty high too.

My favorite one is, "I purchased XXX 250GB hard drive and Windows showed only 233GB. I feel like being taken so I returned the drive to the store." I only hope this guy does not build houses, he would have to return all the 2x4 lumber .

Warranty

Some new HDDs carry a one year warranty; others have 3 or 5 years. Factory Refurbished or Certified Repaired HDDs might carry shorter warranty periods depending on the situations. My replacement IBM drives carried the remaining warranty period from the originals, while Western Digital gave me another 12-month. The policy changes as manufacturers adjust the warranty period from many market factors. Seagate offers a 5-year warranty on its new HDDs.





The HDDs here have the following warranty information from Seagate. Most HDD manufacturer websites contain information page based on Serial Number and Model to list warranty information. It is always a good idea to find this out after you purchased the drive to match what is printed on the box or whatever you have had read prior.



In this case, depending on how long this particular HDD has been sitting in inventory + the remaining 7-month left (now till Feb 08) is the warranty period offered by Seagate on certified repaired drives.

Testing refurbished HDDs -->

Specifications:

Of course, people purchase refurbished HDDs because of the lower cost. Surprisingly, none of my replacement HDDs have yet to fail me insofar.

I use Acronis for my system backup, disk clone and format; Once installed, Acronis does not require floppy or CD to get into DOS mode by simply using F11 during boot up.

Barracuda 7200.9 500GB Specs



Test Setup, Methodology & Results:

Windows XP Test Setup
Case and Cooling	Sonata II: - 120 mm exhaust
CPU	AMD Opteron 165 @2.82 Ghz, 1.40vcore
Motherboard	DFI LanParty UT Ultra D (2x40mm fan added over PWM)
Memory	GSKill PC4400 4x512Mb
Other	DVD R/W 7900GS WD 250GB SATA HDD AMD Stock Heatsink Fan XP Pro SP2 + latest updates

Install Windows XP & SP2 in Raid-0

Disk Clone Wester Digital 250Gb to Seagate single 500GB

Compare 160, 250 and 500 GB using Sandra & HD-Tach read/write

Reading HDD temps from Speedfan

Although I don't favor Raid 0, I installed Windows XP in 14 minutes and SP2 update from CD in 5. Fast!


Average Read 102.1MB/s; burst 267.5MB/s; Random Access 13.8 m/s


Sandra-97 MB/s and 7 m/s

Time to get back "on earth" after the high flying. I cloned my existing WD250 to the Seagate and ran a few comparisons.



While the Seagate has high burst rate, WD250 average read comes out ahead.

Conclusive Thoughts:

One thing to keep in mind is that hard drive companies advertise their size with the idea of 1Mb = 1000Kb, same as 1Gb = 1000Mb, instead of the technically correct: 1Gb = 1024Mb. Hence a hard drive rated by them at 500Gb can only hold ~488Gb when we convert it to the actual size. When formatting to a file system you’ll see a further size reduction, hence when we formatted the RAID 0 stripe with 2x500Gb the actual size in Windows was not 1000Gb but 931Gb. For more information about actual HD space check this article.



HDD will fail as a matter of time; it is the level of data importance we perceive individually. Having a backup is the best route; it requires the discipline and careful selected easy to use software. Drive Image was my favorite until I discovered Acronis when I switched to Vista 6 months ago. With large capacity HDDs affordable pricing and low cost external enclosure, it makes keeping a backup copy of your valuable data offsite doable for many home users. So, keep those photos and video clip coming or bring them to your distant relatives and friends.

While this article does not focus on hard drive technology, it is the need for increasing capacity and where the capacity goes.... to my songs, video clips and photos. And, yes, there is another channel of sales and distribution of HDDs; thanks to the expanding DIY market, factory certified repair HDDs at reduced price is available. I am confident that this market will remain strong as demand warrants its existence. The Seagate drives tested today are priced at $99.5/piece, which is quite a bargain, as you can have a redundant 500Gb storage solution when combined with a RAID 1 config, a feature present on most new motherboards.



With the abundance of gigabytes available at cheap prices the hard drive market is quite stagnant the last several years, while Processors and Video Cards evolve to multi core power beasts, the hard drives remain mechanically limited to a maximum transfer rate, hence slowing down the PC and becoming the bottleneck in most systems. With a ~15ms delay between the system requesting a file and the hard drive finding it there is room for improvement; SCSI drives at 15.000rpm are one remedy proved popular for companies; but for home users it’s not practical in the noise/costs sense. The new alternative are Solid State Drives which feature no moving parts and have access times close to 0ms, unfortunately the first generation of these new storage drives come with lower capacity (<100Gb), high price and maximum transfer rate not much better than normal hard drives (if at all). But there is hope and maybe we’ll see fast, affordable and large SSD appear the coming years, to replace the aging hard drives, and without moving parts, hopefully close to zero RMA and failures.




I thank Michael from Geeks Computer Parts for making this review possible.