Great read. Unfortunately it doesn't reflect all the drives available as its missing SEAGATE drives. However, it does make me feel better that my recent SAMSUNG EcoGreen F2 wasn't a bad choice either since it works great as my backup drive.

"We seem to have established a tradition of writing an article about 1-terabyte hard disk drives each ten months or so"

Indeed. Wouldn't it be time to present a roundup of 2TB harddrives?
Those beasts aren't terrible new on the market either and it would be interesting to hear about their level of maturation and speed.
Somehow I just can't see 1TB harddrives (for 3.5" size that is) interesting at all. Sure not interesting enough to bother digesting 19!!!! pages....
M.

Can someone explain to me, why in a hell anybody will need any of those crappy eco-drives in their desktop?!?? I mean the price is almost similar, the power difference is a joke (10W vs 6W), but the performance drop is HUGE!!! Why do you need one?!?!?!

very amazing article just what i expected from Xbitlabs! i preciate the time for benchmarking and testing the drives Aleksey Meyev , Nikita Nikolaichev Thanks

What a mess...

Why not add SMART test over HD TUNE, some drives will shit it self after HD Tune and SMART check up, specially the Samsung, most people will buy the fastest drive on this test maybe Samsung maybe Hitachi i just wanna say go with Hitachi because is the only save bet in this mess HDD mess. I had too Samsung drives and i'm not buying them any more. I think they are faking SMART to get more from the drive it self.

Anyway don't buy WD with 4k who knows how this reacts with different type of software.
Who knows how good is Seagate go for Seagate XT if got the cash, that's a safe bet.
Samsung no way yes it's fast but like said SMART check up can be deathly on this HDD.
So what's left Hitachi is rock solid go for that specially for RAID conf.

Come on....really? Don't you know your history? I'm really dissapointed.
CHS, Extended CHS does not ring a bell?
XP chooses 63rd sector because it receives 63-sector geometry from BIOS. This was made a standard for LBA to CHS translation in the '90-es. And since early DOS-es, the MBR was the 1st HDD sector and the 1st partition started on the 1st sector ON THE 2ND CYLINDER. So if you manage the BIOS to report 32-sector geometry, XP will create the partition on the 32nd sector. But this needs to be made by ALL BIOSes, otherwise you return to the post-CHS pre-LBA compatibility (that is moving the HDD between 2 computers). So instead of waiting for BIOSes to be fixed, they choose the workaround, which only works on the 1st partition.

And if you format a partition disregarding CHS (let's say with Vista) and then install XP on it, I see no problems. So XP's problem is actually XP INSTALLER's problem.

I'm looking for someone who knows something about the data corruption that I see on my Hitachi .C drive, which is (primarily) a single partition storage drive (I have a few files installed on it along with my pagefile). My many GB collection of mp3s, of which I have protected most with QuickPar at about 20%-25%, have shown about a 90% corruption rate.

Typically, if I created 19 parity blocks per file, months later, in checking the files, I found 2 bad blocks per file needing repairing. On the few where I quickly created just about 5% parity (just to later confirm their integrity before doing my typical 25%), the files were damaged beyond repair.

This corruption extended to many other files resulting in archived executables being corrupted to where they were unusable, including those RARed, though if I RARed them and than zipped them, they tended to fare better.

My Hitachi .B drive (I bought two .C drives at the same time but one failed within a week and the replacement was a .B), which I partitioned as a boot drive, two alternate boot drives, and a storage drive has not had the problem with data corruption, though its performance isn't as good as the later model that corrupts my files.

Anyone know anything of this problem?