marvel-media.com

marvel-media.com



Among the vendors, there has been some consolidation among drive makers, with the market for drives effectively shrinking to five players: Seagate, Western Digital, Toshiba (which acquired Fujitsu's hard drive business this year), Hitachi, and Samsung. Even this varies by market—Toshiba does not make desktop drives, while Seagate, Hitachi, and Fujitsu have dominated enterprise drives. Other vendors sell retail drives, but they buy the basic drives from one of these five and typically add their own software, case, and so on1. * Deskstar 7K2000... In the enterprise storage market, it's not just drives that matter: It's the controllers and software. Both network-attached storage (NAS) and storage-area networks (SANs) continue to grow, with the latter having become a staple of large enterprises. o $189.00 o $185.00 * We compared the dated drive with the latest flagship model on our storage test system, but we also decided to copy the existing Windows XP installation onto the new drive. This provided direct performance comparison using SYSmark 2007. Finally, we installed Windows 7 and repeated the same tests.Although hard drives don't technically follow Moore's Law, they might as well. Every year it seems they get more capacity at lower cost Understanding Hard Drive Performance * There are a few basic things you need to know when you want to upgrade from Windows XP to Windows 7, and a new hard drive. First of all, it's important to understand the basic characteristics of all hard drives. They are based on one or more rotating platters coated with magnetic particles that serve to store bits of data. Heads, like the needles on old record players, take care of reading and writing data on both sides of each platter. Different interfaces are available to connect drives to a PC. Additional technologies, like buffer memory and command reorganization through a feature called NCQ (Native Command Queueing), influence performance. The basic concept has not changed over time, but the density of data on the fewest possible platters. This reduction in complexity generally yields lower power consumption, as well. Personal computers, the computer hardware familiar to most people, form only a small minority of computers (about 0.2% of all new computers produced in 2003) Market statistics. * Higher performance This year's big news was the introduction of 2TB 3.5-inch drives and 1TB 2.5-inch drives, respectively the top-end capacity for desktops and notebooks. Capacity has been growing at about 40 percent a year, and the hard drive space when there are capacity breakthroughs or fresh flagship drives: hitting a new terabyte level, higher RPMs, lower-power models--stuff like that. But each hard drive generation is usually faster than the one that preceded it, which helps to reduce boot and application start times. Also, let’s not forget that Windows 7 is here, and many people who vehemently stood by Windows XP when Vista was around are now considering the upgrade. The full-sized model stores media on a built-in hard drive,