johnw42

http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Storage/Western-Digital-Red-3TB-SATA-SOHO-NAS-Drive-Full-Review/HDTune-401 PCper's review uses HDTune to find a sequential read speed range of 64.9 to 150.5 MB/s. I would have preferred to see the actual HD Tune trace, since sometimes there is a bit of fluctuation with the measured speed, and the MIN and MAX may be a transient blip rather than the main trendline. But at least they did measure the minimum sequential speed, which gives PCper a leg up on SR's review.

Of course it is relevant. The sequential read/write speed of the disk can drop by about a factor of 2 as it fills up and you get to the inner portion. That affects read, writes, and rebuilds. The question is exactly how much it drops for these HDDs as compared to other HDDs. And of course I want to see it, that is why I posted about it.

It would be nice if you included an HD Tune scan showing how the sequential speeds vary from the outer to the inner parts of the platter. Usually it is around a factor of 2 difference, but some drives (like the Hitachi 5K4000) seem to have more a speed drop than others.

I'd love to see an interview from someone at Toshiba about their 3.5" HDD plans for the rest of this year. Is there any chance SR could interview someone at Toshiba? I'd like to know what consumer or prosumer 3.5" HDDs Toshiba plans to sell in the near future, and when they plan to release them. Most of HGST's large 5400rpm HDDs seem to be disappearing from the market, and I wonder whether they will reappear under a Toshiba label, and if so, when?

I certainly agree about avoiding OCZ, but I prefer the more stable non-Sandforce SSDs from companies that make a strong effort for quality and reliability. SSDs such as the Plextor M3P, the Samsung 830, and the Crucial m4 (although the m4 is slower than the Plextor and Samsung models, it is also cheaper at the moment).

Oh, you meant 347 MiB/s rather than 347 MB/s. I think using the correct unit name is more clear than appending the word "binary". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mebibyte

By the way, it would be interesting to see a 128GB V4 with new firmware versus a 128GB Plextor M3P.

You mean sequential write speed is 347MB/s for the 128GB V4 with the new firmware? What do you mean by "binary"? How did you measure the sequential write speed?

I don't think it is much of an improvement. It still trails the Plextor M3P, and the sequential read and write speeds of the V4 still don't look very good (except for the claimed sequential write speed on the 128GB model which looks good, if true, which is a big if with OCZ). As for why OCZ released it before it was ready, do you really have to ask? This is OCZ we are talking about. Quality is someone else's job. OCZ is all about hype and misleading the customer.

"On the 512GB model, sequential 2MB transfers increased slightly with both read and write activity" Huh? Looking at the graph, they DECREASED for FW1.4, 467->428, 440->435

Probably not. I think the previous prices were unsustainably low. In my experience, Samsung was making the best HDDs. And Samsung is a HUGE company. And yet they found that the HDD business was not profitable enough for them to continue, so they sold their HDD business. This indicates to me that the HDD prices were too low to sustain the required R&D and production equipment investments while maintaining a profit margin equivalent to Samsung's other business units.

In an unrestricted market, ALWAYS. If the supply of a product suddenly goes down, then in an unrestricted market, the only way for demand to go down to match supply is for the price to rise. In a restricted market, when one group tries to force another group to sell at certain prices, the price may not go down but you will have shortages, rationing, bribes and corruption and underground markets.

Actually, those who understand basic economics know that when there is a supply shock of decreased supply, prices adjust higher in order to match demand to the decreased supply.

And yet I STILL cannot buy an internal consumer 3.5" 4TB HDD with 1TB platters. Seagate's 1TB platter models stop at 3TB, and Hitachi's 5K4000 model has 5 800GB platters (and hence is no faster than most 2TB HDDs). Come on, WD, bring on the 1TB platter HDDs!

In my limited experience, an important quality for video editing is high sequential write speed for incompressible data. I think the Plextor M3P has the highest incompressible data sequential write speed of any consumer SSD, so in that sense it should be a good choice for video editing. I don't have any experience with SSDs in a Mac environment, so I cannot comment on that aspect of your question.