Inside the box: TCP Lab looks at internal drives
By Sean Carruthers, posted 2/13/2003 1:38:15 PM
Back in our January 2003 issue, we
took a look at a few external storage options. Despite their convenience
and easy installation, some users simply need a new internal hard
drive--their boot drive is just too small (a lot of systems that are just
a few years old have a boot drive of 4 GB or smaller), it's failing, or
maybe they want to set up a RAID array for maximum data protection. The
good news is that internal drives are still the most widely available form
of hard drive, and they're still a lot cheaper than the external versions,
thanks to their compactness and the fact that no IDE-to-USB/FireWire
interface hardware is needed.
A few things to keep in mind when selecting a new internal hard drive:
The legalese Testing was done on an Intel D850EMV2 motherboard, with a 3.05 GHz
Pentium 4 processor and 512 MB of PC1066 RDRAM. For reference, we started
our test with an older 30 GB IBM Deskstar drive, which managed the
following:
PC Mark 2002
IBM Deskstar 180GXP PC Mark 2002 Pro: Tag 'n' Seek technology improves performance. Large buffer.
Con: Larger capacities require special IDE adapter.
IBM's line of desktop hard drives is ever-expanding, and the Deskstar
180GXP is one of the first to incorporate the Tag'n'Seek technology
(borrowed from the company's SCSI line). Tag'n'Seek improves overall
performance by reorganizing commands sent between the drive and the host
PC for maximum efficiency. The benchmarking numbers we achieved with this
drive--much higher than most of the other drives we've seen--indicate the
advantage it can add to a system.
As with other drives in the Deskstar line, the number in the drive's
name refers to its maximum capacity, in this case 180 GB. That
highest-capacity drive will almost certainly cause problems in most
machines, thanks to the 137 GB limit found on most motherboards, meaning
you may have to purchase a special IDE adapter to use it to its full
capacity. A utility floppy is included in the retail box, allowing you to
partition the drive into smaller chunks so your computer can properly
handle the drive.
Maxtor 250GB PC Mark 2002 Pro: High-capacity. Faster interface. Mounting brackets
included.
Con: Requires adapter card to use full capacity with single
partition. Spindle rate means slower performance than 7,200 rpm drive.
Maxtor has been pushing hard drive capacity boundaries for quite some
time, and has hit a new high-water mark with the 250 GB internal drive
that is now out in a retail kit for upgraders. The larger capacity comes
at a cost, though: the drive only has a 5,400 rpm spindle speed, which
means slower overall performance despite the ATA/133 interface.
As with any drive this large, you'll likely run into problems if you
try to plug it directly into your motherboard's IDE slot, thanks to the
137 GB capacity limitation. If you don't have a RAID controller onboard to
handle larger-capacity drives, consider purchasing a compatible IDE card
separately. (Some, but not all, versions of this kit may feature the card
as a bonus, so be prepared to spend a few extra dollars. The Maxtor
ATA/133 card will run you US$50.)
As expected, the performance is reasonable but not quite as ripping as
some other drives out there. In the end, this drive is a great choice for
users who need a lot of storage space for things like MP3 files or digital
photos. If you're adding it in as a second drive, the box even comes with
mounting brackets for installing it into one of the full-sized bays, just
in case you don't have another hard drive-sized spot available.
Samsung SpinPoint SV1204H PC Mark 2002 Pro: Generally good price point. Very quiet.
Con: Not quite the performance level of other drives. SpinPoint
line maxes out at 120 GB capacity.
We say frill-free because typically the drives don't come with the full
retail box packaging, and Samsung's drives don't typically push the
bleeding edge of the technology. Instead, they're basic value-priced
offerings that give most users exactly what they need: a hard drive with
enough space to fit a whole lot of digital photos, MP3 files, and the
occasional video file.
Because the drive has a 5,400 rpm spindle speed, it turns in lower
numbers than the faster Seagate drive, but that will only become an issue
for users doing really demanding multimedia work. For the rest of us, this
drive does the job just fine.
What's nice about the SpinPoint drive is that it's a touch quieter than
the Seagate drive during read/write mode--a nice accomplishment when you
consider that the low noise level is one of Seagate's big selling points!
Note: Currently this model is only sold in the U.S. However, at press
time a representative of Samsung Electronics Canada said he expects the
SP-1204H (a 7,200 rpm, 120 GB drive) will be available here by the time
this issue hits the streets for a suggested retail price of $349.99.
Seagate Barracuda ATA V ST3120023A Pro: High performance. Very quiet. Good warranty. SeaTools is a
great utility.
Con: A touch more expensive.
In addition to the drive, the retail boxed version includes the ATA/100
cable (in case you don't have one handy), an installation guide, and a CD
with installation tools/utilities.
The CD also includes SeaTools, which can help you diagnose hard drive
problems, if there's something wrong with your system and you're not quite
sure if it's the drive. The best thing about this utility is that it's not
Seagate-specific--you can use it to diagnose other hard drives and other
parts of your system. The program will even recommend a course of action
based on what it finds. (You can download this software for free from the
Seagate Web site, or run a version of it directly from the Web page.)
Though the drive we tested used the ATA/100 interface, a Serial ATA
version of the drive is also forthcoming, with a 150 Mbps transfer rate to
and from the host and easier connections to Serial ATA-compatible
motherboards.
Internal DVD rewriteable That may be about to change. The newest DVD writers are hitting the
streets, with features that may win over the reluctant. And at 4.7 GB
each, a blank DVD has enough capacity to hold nearly seven CDs worth of
data.
The new drives will burn to both DVD and CD media, meaning one drive
can meet all of your burning needs. Further, many of the new DVD drives
can burn to more than one type of DVD media, eliminating the format
problem that's plagued writeable DVD for the last several years. Not only
can these drives burn video in a format compatible with your component DVD
player, the lines between DVD-R/RW and DVD+R/RW camps are beginning to
blur.
Best of all, the drives are starting to drop in price; some we've
looked at this month are under $500, which is still more expensive than a
CD burner but cheaper than CD burners were when they first hit the market.
Though we initially looked at a few DVD internal drives in the January
2003 issue, we received this one shortly after that article ran, and
thought we'd bring you up to date!
Pioneer DVR-A05 Pro: Fastest burn for write-once DVD media. Good compatibility
with DVD video players. Good price point. Good software bundle.
Con: Incompatible with DVD+RW/DVD-RAM.
Setup was fairly easy in our XP box, and before long we were burning
both CD and DVD media. Even better, the Pioneer drive is able to burn
DVD-R at 4X, nearly twice the speed of its nearest competitor. The big
downside here is that the drive will not burn DVD-RAM, DVD+R or DVD+RW
media, like some of the other drives.
Belkin USB 2.0 The enclosure accomplishes this by using the mounting holes found on
the bottom of your hard drive or optical drive, instead of holes on the
side, eliminating the need for special mounting brackets if you want to
use the enclosure for a hard drive. The installation procedure is pretty
simple: pull the top half off, insert your drive, secure it with the
included screws, then put the top half of the enclosure back on and attach
the side rails to lock the halves together. (Also included: a front
mounting plate you can use to keep naughty fingers away from the hard
drive. If you're using a CD or DVD drive, the plate isn't necessary.)
The enclosure is compatible with pretty much any IDE hard drive, and
the interface will handle ATA/33, ATA/66, and ATA/100 drives at their full
speeds; ATA/133 drives should work, but only at ATA/100 speeds. The
enclosure also has a built-in fan, so 7,200 rpm drives shouldn't be a
problem. For CD or DVD drives, an audio connector is thoughtfully
provided, allowing you to channel audio back through your sound card,
though you'll have to supply your own cable for that.
The enclosure should be compatible with newer versions of Windows right
out of the box. A driver disk is included for versions that won't
recognize your drive as soon as you plug it in. The drive should also work
with Mac OS 8.6 through 9.x, though only at USB 1.1 speed (11 Mbps as
opposed USB 2.0's top speed of 480 Mbps).
Pocketec Pockey DataStor Pro: Very small; just slightly bigger than a bare 2.5-inch
notebook drive; USB 2.0; no external power brick needed.
Con: Performance is leisurely, cost per megabyte is higher than
external devices based on full-size drives.
On one end are a mini USB 2.0 port, a three-way switch (off, USB power,
and external power), the drive status light, and a power connector jack.
You don't need to use auxiliary power, since the USB port also supplies
power to the drive, but if you want independent power, it comes with a
power cable with a dual head that you can plug into either another USB
port or the PS/2 port.
The performance is leisurely, which might be expected since notebook
drives are typically slower than desktop drives, but we still found it
much faster than products that use a USB 1.1 connection. From a desktop
computer equipped with a 7,200 rpm drive, we copied about 500 MB of data
to the Pockey in roughly 50 seconds, giving an effective transfer rate of
about 10 Mbps.
Momobay CX-2 Pro: Drive is user installed, so capacity can be increased by
buying a larger drive; small case for portability; both USB 2.0 and
FireWire supported; no external power brick needed.
Con: On notebooks using CardBus FireWire, the port is unpowered,
which means the USB cable must also be plugged into supply power to drive
(this is not a limitation of the Momobay, but does complicate use in some
circumstances), performance is leisurely (comparable to the Pockey unit).
We hooked it to a Belkin USB 2.0/FireWire combo card that was installed
in a 1.8 GHz Pentium 4 desktop system, and thought this might be a good
way to test the performance of FireWire versus USB 2.0. However, it was
not to be. While the unit worked without a hitch when plugged into the USB
2.0 port, we constantly ran into I/O errors when copying the same set of
files through the FireWire port.
We are still working with Momobay's technical support on this, but it
seems to be a conflict between the combo card and the drive, rather than a
fault of the drive alone.
When we tested the drive on a notebook system through a Lava PC Card
FireWire card, the drive performed flawlessly (and a different FireWire
drive on the Belkin FireWire port also worked fine). Interestingly,
copying the same 500 MB file set from the desktop PC using USB 2.0 and the
notebook using FireWire (with a reformatting of the Momobay drive between
tests) resulted in almost identical performance of about 50 seconds.
One thing we didn't care for when using the drive with a notebook
through a PC Card is that we needed to also plug in the USB cable just to
supply power. This is because the FireWire PC Card does not supply power.
To its credit, DVico has designed a pretty good solution for this
limitation--a three-way switch on the back for powered USB, powered
FireWire and unpowered FireWire. Under the latter setting, you also plug
in the USB cable, but only to supply power, not for data.
This is not as elegant as a single cable connection, but at least you
don't need to carry a separate power brick and go hunting for an AC outlet
just to use the drive. And when used with the USB 2.0 port, it's every bit
as slick as the Pockey, requiring just a single cable for both data and
power.
Like the Pockey drive, the Momobay comes with a carrying case. It's
leather, which looks nicer than the Pockey's cloth case, but isn't padded.
It also comes with a small but well-illustrated manual explaining how to
install a drive and the various connection options.
--Sean Carruthers and David Tanaka
* Prices estimated from US dollars. Exchange rate at time of writing:
1.57.
External storage for your digital media
Pro: Portable drive easier to tote than notebook; 30 GB is a lot
of digital media; PC Card slot compatible with any removable media that
comes with PC Card adapter; FireWire and USB onboard.
Con: Rechargeable battery may not last as long as you'd like;
USB is only 1.1; expensive!
If you're a big fan of digital photography, digital audio, or any other
passion that requires extensive use of removable digital media like
CompactFlash, SmartMedia or SecureDigital, here's your digital wallet.
The MindStor line of products feature a compact hard drive and a PC
Card slot, and an interface that makes it incredibly easy to move your
data from one to the other. So, if you're on an extended roadtrip, you
don't have to bring a notebook computer to offload your photographs from
your CF card--just stick it into a PC Card adapter, drop it into the
MindStor, transfer files, and reuse the CF card.
Alternately, if you have an MP3 player with a small card in it, just
pop that card into the MindStor when you want to swap your MP3 files for a
new batch. The three-button interface on the front of the MindStor is
quite easy to use and the menu system, while not the most visually
stunning we've seen, is exceptionally intuitive.
When you finally get home, it's fairly easy to download your data to
your PC, as the MindStor has both USB 1.1 and FireWire connections. (In
fact, the MindStor can be used as an external hard drive when you connect
it to your PC via either of these cables.)
Oddly, only the USB cable is included in the box. Since USB 1.1 is a
mere fraction of the transfer speed of FireWire, it'll be well worth the
investment to pick up a 4-to-6-pin FireWire adapter cable when you buy the
MindStor (if you have FireWire on your PC, of course).
You can get the MindStor and the accessories at camera stores that
carry digital equipment or directly from the company Web site, but keep in
mind that with the latter, you'll be shopping in US dollars.
--Sean Carruthers
URL for this story:
We used the hard disk tests found in eTesting
Labs Inc.'s (http://www.etestinglabs.com/) WinBench99 2.0
benchmarking software. All testing was done independently and without
verification from eTesting Labs Inc., which makes no representations or
warranties as to these results.
HDD 587
WinBench99 2.0 Kbps
Business Disk Winmark 4,410
High-End Disk
Winmark 13,700
From: IBM Corp., www.ibm.com
Price: Varies by capacity
HDD 1,252
WinBench99 2.0 Kbps
Business Disk 10,500
High-End Disk 25,700
From: Maxtor Corp., http://www.maxtor.com/
Estimated price: US$400
HDD 814
WinBench99 2.0 Kbps
Business Disk 5,290
High-End Disk 15,700
From: Samsung Electronics Canada
Inc..,
http://www.samsung.com/
Suggested retail price:
$279.99
HDD 842
WinBench99 2.0 Kbps
Business Disk 3,980
High-End Disk 12,300
Samsung's SpinPoint series of hard drives may not
gain a lot of attention when put up against all of the drives with special
retail packaging, but thanks to the fact that they're frill-free, they're
typically less expensive. The SV1204H is part of the V60 series of
SpinPoint drives, which means they have 60 GB per platter; thus, the
two-platter drive we had a chance to look at sports 120 GB.
From: Seagate Technology,
http://www.seagate.com/
Estimated street: up to $299
PC Mark 2002
HDD 942
WinBench99 2.0 Kbps
Business Disk 6,410
High-End Disk 17,300
One of Seagate's recent goals was to make its drives
as quiet as possible, and the company has largely succeeded, with acoustic
levels for its IDE hard drive that are so low they were often on the verge
of being inaudible. The good news is that this silence isn't being bought
at the cost of high capacity or excellent performance: the Barracuda V
series still has both.
When DVD debuted in the late '90s,
we expected big things from the technology: its higher capacity made it a
natural for video applications, and there was serious potential for data
backup, too. Since that point, the format has revolutionized the world of
home video, dramatically scaling back the demand for videotapes. In the PC
world it's been a harder sell. While a lot of new systems ship with a
DVD-ROM drive onboard, the CD burner has been a bigger draw for those who
want to add a new optical drive.
From: Pioneer, http://www.pioneerelectronics.com/
Estimated price:
$475 (US$299)
Pioneer is one of the companies responsible for the
DVD-RW and DVD-R standards, and as you'd expect, its newest drive uses
those formats. The DVR-A05 is the company's newest DVD recordable
solution, and as before Pioneer is focusing heavily on the compatibility
between its recordable solution and DVD Video. That's not to say that the
drive isn't a good solution for data storage, though. It comes with a good
software bundle allowing it to be used for both video and data
applications.
A few twists on the external drive
In the January 2003 issue we
looked at a external hard drives, but we've found a few other devices that
put a spin on this option. We have a kit that converts internal hard
drives to external units, and two devices that are particularly well
suited to notebook users: an external hard drive and a drive enclosure
that are small and don't need external power sources, drawing what they
need from the notebook itself.
External Drive Enclosure Kit (F5U209)
From: Belkin Corp., http://www.belkin.com/
Estimated price: US$110
Belkin has been one of the biggest boosters of USB
2.0, with a number of add-in cards and a whole range of products to take
advantage of the technology. Now, its new USB 2.0 drive enclosure makes it
possible for you to convert any device that would sit on your IDE chain
into an external device, whether it's a hard drive or optical
drive--including CD-ROM, CD-RW, DVD-ROM, or DVD drives.
From: Pocketec, http://www.pocketec.net/
Estimated prices*: $315 (20 GB), $395 (30 GB), $470 (40 GB), $630 (60
GB)
There's not much to say about this elegant little
drive--just plug it in and go. It's a very clean design: brushed aluminum
case with black plastic end caps and not much bigger than the notebook
drive it houses. It's the same size as a 3x5-inch index card, and just
1.25 cm (0.5 in.) thick. It weighs just 155 g (5.5 oz.) and comes with a
soft, lightly padded carrying case.
From: DVico, http://www.dvico.com/ (Canadian distributor Paratech
Trading)
Price: $199, $399 (with 20 GB hard drive)
(Note: Product
is a shell only. Purchaser needs to supply hard drive, or buy bundled with
Momobay.)
Outwardly, this resembles the Pockey DataStore, save
some minor cosmetics, but there are two differences of note. First, the
unit offers both USB 2.0 and FireWire connections. Secondly, it is a shell
only--you supply and install your own 2.5-inch notebook drive. The unit we
received for testing from the Canadian distributor, Paratech Trading in
Vancouver, came with a 20 GB drive installed.
MindStor PSS-1830
From: Minds@Work, http://www.mindsatwork.net/
Estimated price: $770
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