Livin' Large
We test the latest in jumbo drives to see which deliver the most speed, capacity, and ease of use for the money.Stan Miastkowski
The old sideshow barker's patter about "amazing, colossal, and stupendous" attractions could well apply to the latest crop of hard disk drives. In our last roundup of drives, in October 1999, 20GB models were among the biggest. Now 20GB drives are middle-of-the-road and often appear in low-cost PCs.
This time around, we review what Ed Sullivan might have called " really big" drives. Yes, if your data-storage needs and your budget are modest, a good selection of drives is available in the vicinity of 20GB. At the other extreme, some drives hover in the 60GB-to-80GB range. But the sweet spot where you get ample capacity for a reasonable price now lies around 40GB.
We tested ten flagship drives from four major manufacturers: IBM, Maxtor, Seagate, and Western Digital. We evaluated IBM's 20.5GB Deskstar 40GV, as well as the company's 46.1GB and 75.1GB Deskstar 75GXP models. Maxtor provided the 40.9GB DiamondMax VL 40, the 60.5GB DiamondMax Plus 60, and the 81GB DiamondMax 80. Seagate sent two 40GB drives--the U Series 5 and the Barracuda ATA III. And finally, Western Digital supplied the 20GB WD Protégé and the 40GB WD Caviar.
Quantum, the other big name in consumer hard drives, is missing from our list because its new drive, the Fireball Plus AS, was not ready in time for this article. But you can read our review, " New Quantum Fireball: Gobs of Gigs." While working on our review, we also learned that Maxtor has purchased Quantum's hard drive operations. The two companies are working out a merger, but for now, each maintains its own line of drives. Other manufacturers, including Fujitsu, Hitachi, Samsung, and Toshiba, are omitted because they primarily sell bare drives to original equipment manufacturers such as PC vendors, not directly to consumers.
Squeezing In Data
In most cases, today's drives offer twice the capacity of last year's models for about the same price. On a per-gigabyte basis, prices for this year's crop range from $3.83 to $7.06, with half the drives falling in the range from $4 to $5. If you're looking to make a modest investment, a 20GB drive is a great choice--with an average street price of just over $100; 40GB drives, depending on rotational speed, run from $145 to $195. If you want the maximum storage space, you'll need to lay down a few more bucks: Figure on spending about $300 to $500 for drives with capacities between 60GB and 80GB.
You can get more storage for the same price every time you upgrade, thanks to the continuing increase in areal density--the amount of data that can be stored on a single, two-sided disk platter. To make an even bigger drive, manufacturers stack up multiple platters. Most vendors stop at four platters per drive, but IBM manages to squeeze a fifth platter into a standard 1-inch-high case.
A couple of years ago, a platter could store only 5GB of data. That figure jumped to 10GB around January 2000, and 20GB platters were becoming standard by the fall of last year. (All the drives here pack approximately 20GB per platter, with the exception of IBM's 15GB-per-platter Deskstar 75GXP drives.) At press time, we learned that Western Digital had upped the areal density in its new WD Caviar drive to 30GB per platter.
Greater areal density allows manufacturers to reduce the number of components in drives of a given capacity, which lowers their cost. Packing data closer together also speeds up performance, since read/write heads don't have to travel as far to find information. A year ago, a 20GB hard drive had to consist of two platters and two pairs of read/write heads (one head for each side of a platter). But 20GB drives using today's technology have just one platter and a single pair of heads.
Some industry analysts expect areal density to reach 40GB per platter toward the end of this summer. If that happens, we could see drives with capacities of 200GB by the end of the year. Those same pundits expect areal density to double again, to 80GB per platter, sometime in 2002. But hard drive makers say that 80GB per platter is close to the current limit, and that squeezing any more data onto one disk will require the integration of new and more-expensive technologies.
Delivering Data Faster
Beyond the push to expand storage capacity, there's a genuine need to deliver the data faster, triggered by gigahertz-plus CPUs and data-hungry operations such as video processing.
Several factors determine how quickly a drive can read or write data. One is rotational speed: Five of the drives we review spin their disks at 5400 revolutions per minute, the remaining five at 7200 rpm. A faster rotational speed lets the read/write heads cover more of the disk and read or write more data in the same amount of time. The 7200-rpm drives we looked at usually outperformed the 5400-rpm units, but not always. In our time tests, the fastest 5400-rpm drives, like Maxtor's DiamondMax 80 and DiamondMax VL 40, outran the slower 7200-rpm models, such as Seagate's Barracuda ATA III.
In addition to increasing the rotational speed, manufacturers can squeeze out better performance by fine-tuning the design of read/write heads and the algorithms that control them. It seems more than coincidental that the fastest 5400-rpm drives here come from the same vendor that produced the top-performing 7200-rpm model.
Performance also varies with the size of a hard drive's internal cache--memory used to store recently accessed data temporarily and to front-load adjacent data that an application may request next. In all cases, drives with a 2048KB cache outperformed those with only a 512KB cache.
Then there is the matter of how quickly a drive communicates with the rest of the system. Most PCs sitting on desks today use the Ultra DMA/66 (also known as Ultra ATA/66) flavor of the IDE interface, which can deliver data in bursts of up to 66MB per second. (In regular use, drives transfer data at well below the burst rate.)
The newest PCs generally use the Ultra DMA/100 interface, with a maximum burst rate of 100 MBps. Industry analysts expect Ultra DMA/100 to remain the standard interface until the end of this year. Early in 2002, though, the next interface, Ultra DMA/133, is slated to appear.
All the drives reviewed here use Ultra DMA/100, and we tested them on a PC equipped with a matching interface, courtesy of an Ultra DMA/100 add-in card from Promise Technologies. We then retested the fastest 7200-rpm and 5400-rpm drives with a Promise Ultra DMA/66 card.
Our informal tests of maximum burst rate showed that the drives performed a bit slower with the Ultra DMA/66 interface, but we found no significant difference in the PC World Test Center's real-world, application-based performance tests. That's not surprising. For years, the capacity of the Ultra DMA interface has outpaced the sustained transfer rate of a single hard drive. But the excess capacity present in the interface will be available to accommodate faster drives later on.
Interface of the Future
Interface speed limits will jump even more with the transition to Serial ATA, which is expected to debut late this year or early in 2002 and should raise the top transfer limit to 150 MBps. Next, the limit is expected to double to 300 MBps and eventually redouble to 600 MBps. In addition to being faster, Serial ATA looks different from current IDE parallel connections. Instead of using 80-wire, flat-ribbon cables, it has a round cable about the size of your PC's mouse cord, with an eight-pin connector on each end. The smaller cables take up less space and allow cooling air to flow more freely through a PC's interior, theoretically permitting smaller, more innovative system designs.
When Serial ATA arrives, you can say good-bye to drive jumpers--those connectors that fit onto one of several sets of pins and tell the drive whether it should act as the main, or master, drive on a shared ribbon cable, or whether it should serve as the auxiliary, or slave, drive. With Serial ATA's new star topology, individual cables will radiate from a central interface on the motherboard, each connecting to only a single, independent drive.
Is It Time to Upgrade?
Better, faster technology is always around the corner, so if you're considering upgrading now, you'll need to weigh some other factors--starting with how full your current drive is. If you constantly prune unneeded data and still have a drive that's more than 75 percent full, it's probably time for a step up. Even if you don't foresee filling that remaining space with permanent files, you'll need some wiggle room to accommodate the Windows swap file and other temporary files that your applications create.
Just how big a drive you should choose depends on what you do with your PC. If you work mainly with garden-variety applications such as a word processor or a spreadsheet program, you are unlikely to create large files that consume a lot of hard drive space, and you could probably opt for an inexpensive drive such as the 20.5GB version of IBM's Deskstar 40GV. But if you edit and save graphics, audio, or video files, your storage space can disappear quickly. For example, video from a digital camcorder can require up to 3.6MB per second. A 1-hour movie fills about 13GB of storage, and you'll need plenty of extra space for temporary files created during the editing process.
Does Speed Matter?
In addition to the issue of available storage, there's the question of speed. The 5400-rpm hard drives are value leaders, but 7200-rpm drives generally deliver better performance. Here, as with capacity, your speed needs depend on the type of applications you run.
To evaluate a drive's performance, the PC World Test Center timed how long each drive took to perform common tasks (for details, see the test report). To begin, we copied 166MB of data, first as a collection of individual files and folders, and then as a single zipped file. Next we ran automated scripts that performed disk-intensive operations in Adobe Photoshop 5.5, Microsoft Access 97, and Corel Photo-Paint 8. Finally, we ran a find file operation that required searching through files on the entire hard drive for a string of text.
The range of scores varied from test to test. All drives performed quite similarly on Access 97 and Photoshop 5.5, for instance (differing by 2 percent and 7 percent, respectively). But we saw much bigger differences on the two file copy tests (about 170 percent and 250 percent, respectively) and on the find file test, where the speediest drive was almost three times faster than the slowest. So if you routinely move large amounts of data to and from your hard drive (as in video editing), the speed differences will matter. If you're a digital video professional (or a dedicated amateur), one of the largest, fastest drives on this list, such as Maxtor's DiamondMax Plus 60 or IBM's 75.1GB Deskstar 75GXP, is worth the cost.
The fastest drives on the market today use SCSI interfaces: 10,000-rpm SCSI drives are common, and Seagate produces a 15,000-rpm model. Such ultrafast drives are designed for use in busy, multiuser environments--such as heavily trafficked servers--and they cost about twice as much as current IDE drives of similar capacity. For both of those reasons, this review does not cover SCSI drives.
Drive Reliability
Hard drive failures were common about a decade ago, but reliability has improved considerably since then. Most of today's drives are rated for many years of service, and in most cases the drives that do fail were damaged from a bump or a fall during shipping. Manufacturers have been working hard to protect drives from such hazards with shock-resistant designs and special packaging. Seagate's SeaShell, for example, is a plastic shell designed to offer extra bump-and-drop protection for a drive after you remove it from the foam packaging in its shipping box and before you install it in your PC.
But don't let the improved reliability of today's hard drives lull you into complacency about backing up your data. Drives still fail, and accidents do happen. To learn all about backup devices, media, and strategies, see " Hassle-Free Backups" in our October 2000 issue.
Inside the Box
If you decide to spring for a new hard drive, you'll probably have the pleasure of installing it yourself. Though the project isn't especially difficult, it does require patience, some tools, and intermediate-level familiarity with the innards of your computer. For step-by-step instructions, see our July 2000 Upgrade Guide.
The manufacturers represented in our roundup package their drives in upgrade kits that include step-by-step installation instructions, mounting brackets, a cable, and software that automates formatting the new drive and transferring data from the old one. We applaud one new trend: Every drive we tested this year had its all-important jumper settings clearly marked on the unit. And Seagate goes a step further, printing basic installation instructions right on the drive.
All the upgrade kits we examined provided good to excellent setup software, though Maxtor and Seagate had the best setup utilities. Maxtor's MaxBlast Plus runs from a bootable DOS floppy disk; Seagate's DiscWizard runs within Windows. Both utilities analyze your existing setup before you physically install the new hard drive, and they print out installation instructions based on the configuration of your PC (for example, the number of IDE devices you have). After you've installed the new drive, the software partitions and formats it when you restart your PC. (For more on partitioning, see " Managing Your Hard Drive.")
Seagate and IBM use a customized version of Ontrack's Disk Manager DiskGo. The utility runs in Windows before you install the drive, and it provides both graphics and text to guide you through setup. Like the Maxtor and Seagate utilities, DiskGo finishes the job after you hook up the drive and restart your computer. DiskGo is effective, but Maxtor's and Seagate's setup utilities are still slightly easier to use.
Western Digital's installation software, dubbed EZ-Install, is adequate, but it's not as helpful as the utilities from the other drive makers. For example, EZ-Install doesn't perform any preinstallation analysis of your system, and it doesn't provide customized instructions.
One caveat: If your computer was made before January 1998, its BIOS probably doesn't directly support drives larger than 8.4GB. Fortunately, the software packages with all the hard drives we tested include a driver that provides a workaround. Nevertheless, don't install this driver if you don't need it. The driver writes proprietary data to your Master Book Record and may prevent you from installing some other drive-management software, such as partitioning utilities. It may also prevent drive-imaging utilities from working correctly.
In addition to software, we also evaluated the documentation that came with each hard drive. Western Digital provides a very thorough printed installation manual, and Maxtor includes a handy foldout poster. Seagate provides both an installation guide and a manual to complement the basic instructions printed on the drive, and IBM includes a richly illustrated and comprehensive setup manual as well as complete technical reference documentation (although most users likely won't need the detailed information it contains).
If You Get Stuck
All the hard drive makers have come a long way in providing Web-based support. But just as with installation software, Maxtor and Seagate lead the competition with generous online offerings, including step-by-step troubleshooting guides, detailed answers to frequently asked questions, and advanced technical documents. Both also offer downloads of diagnostic software you can run if you suspect something is wrong with your new drive. Seagate adds online troubleshooting and automated phone- and fax-based support.
If you really get stuck, you can always pick up the phone and call tech support. All the companies except Seagate offer toll-free phone assistance from a live person. Seagate's support calls are on your dime (its automated phone support is toll-free). With only one of these drives do you pay a fee for tech support: Western Digital provides just 30 days of free support for its $119 WD Protégé drive, but you can purchase lifetime coverage for an additional $15. Hours and days for tech support vary (see our features chart).
We gauged each company's tech support with two calls. First we asked what IDE cable we should install the drive on and how we should set the jumper. Then we purposely failed to fully insert the IDE cable and asked why the drive was not functioning. We were pleased to find that, without exception, we got through quickly and received accurate answers.
Making Choices
How did we choose our Best Buys? The PC World Test Center's extensive evaluations did detect some differences in drive performance. We also compared the hard drives' price, upgrade-kit quality, and tech support policies. There isn't a drive here that we wouldn't recommend. But for overall value, Maxtor's DiamondMax Plus 60 ($300) wins our Best Buy among 7200-rpm drives, offering excellent performance and a good user experience for a fair price. Maxtor wins again in the 5400-rpm drive category with its 40.9GB DiamondMax VL 40 ($180). Both drives also offer a reasonable cost per gigabyte.
But it would be hard to go wrong with any of these drives. While our test results vary, the drives are more alike than different: All use similar components and the same basic technologies, which have proved to be very reliable. As IDC senior analyst David Reinsel sums it up: "Everyone is building a good-quality drive."
Hard Drive: Features Comparison (chart)
| 7200-rpm drive | Street price (12/4/00) | Disk capacity | Cost per GB | Cache size | Performance1 | Quality of upgrade kit2 | Parts/labor warranty (years) | Support hours: weekday/Saturday/Sunday | Toll-free support | Tech support fee |
| IBM Deskstar 75GXP 888/426-5214 www.storage.ibm.com/deskstar | $240 | 46.1GB | $5.21 | 2048KB | Very good | Good | 3/3 | 24/24/24 | Yes | No |
| IBM Deskstar 75GXP 888/426-5214 www.storage.ibm.com/deskstar | $530 | 75.1GB | $7.06 | 2048KB | Very good | Good | 3/3 | 24/24/24 | Yes | No |
| Best Buy Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 60 800/262-9867 www.maxtor.com | $300 | 60.5GB | $4.96 | 2048KB | Excellent | Very good | 3/3 | 12/0/0 | Yes | No |
| Seagate Barracuda ATA III 877/271-3285 www.seagate.com | $180 | 40GB | $4.50 | 2048KB | Good | Excellent | 3/3 | 10/0/0 | No3 | No |
| Western Digital WD Caviar 800/275-4932 www.wdc.com | $169 | 40GB | $4.23 | 2048KB | Very good | Poor | 3/3 | 9/8/0 | Yes | No |
| 5400-rpm drive | Street price (12/4/00) | Disk capacity | Cost per GB | Cache size | Performance1 | Quality of upgrade kit2 | Parts/labor warranty (years) | Support hours: weekday/Saturday/Sunday | Toll-free support | Tech support fee |
| IBM Deskstar 40GV 888/426-5214 www.storage.ibm.com/deskstar | $99 | 20.5GB | $4.83 | 512KB | Fair | Good | 3/3 | 24/24/24 | Yes | No |
| Maxtor DiamondMax 80 800/262-9867 www.maxtor.com | $310 | 81GB | $3.83 | 2048KB | Very good | Very good | 3/3 | 12/0/0 | Yes | No |
| Best Buy Maxtor DiamondMax VL 40 800/262-9867 www.maxtor.com | $180 | 40.9GB | $4.40 | 2048KB | Very good | Very good | 3/3 | 12/0/0 | Yes | No |
| Seagate U Series 5 877/271-3285 www.seagate.com | $145 | 40GB | $3.63 | 512KB | Poor | Excellent | 3/3 | 10/0/0 | No3 | No |
| Western Digital WD Protégé 800/275-4932 www.wdc.com | $119 | 20GB | $5.95 | 2048KB | Good | Poor | 1/1 | 9/8/0 | Yes | Yes4 |
Best Buys
Maxtor's speedy, user-friendly drives win as Best Buys in both our 7200-rpm and 5400-rpm categories. The 7200-rpm, 60.5GB DiamondMax Plus 60 ($300) was the fastest drive in our tests. Maxtor's 40.9GB DiamondMax VL 40 ($180) beat nearly every drive in the 5200-rpm category (excluding its cousin, the DiamondMax 80) and also outperformed two of the 7200-rpm competitors. Each hard drive comes with a very good upgrade kit and offers ample storage at a moderate cost per gigabyte.
Managing Your Hard Drive
So you've laid down the bucks for that brand-new giant hard drive. You're the ruler of a vast multigigabyte kingdom, but how will you govern it? Do you want one seemingly endless expanse of disk? Or should you divide it into smaller, logical drives, known in nerdspeak as partitions?
Each partition has its own drive letter (C:, D:, and so forth), and multiple drives can be a handy way to organize files. One strategy is to divide a disk into three partitions: one for the operating system, one for applications, and a third for data. This arrangement imposes some order and can save your bacon if a major operating system crash forces you to reformat the drive. You can safely wipe the OS partition without touching your data.
In the old days, altering partitions was a major, painful operation. Microsoft's Fdisk--which comes with Windows and used to be your only choice--requires wiping the disk clean in order to reallocate partitions. Today, two commercial utilities--PowerQuest's $70 PartitionMagic 6 and V-Communications' $30 Partition Commander 6--allow you to create, delete, or resize drive partitions without harming your data; both are solid products that PC World has recommended. (Of course, you should always play it safe and back up critical data before making a significant change to a hard drive.) Read our reviews of these two products: " PartitionMagic 6.0: Disk Division Made Easy" and " Divvy Up Your Disk With Partition Commander 6.0."
Partitioning becomes necessary if you use multiple operating systems, because each OS must reside in its own partition. And you may have to format those partitions in different ways. Although Windows NT and Windows 2000 can use the FAT and FAT32 file allocation systems, they perform better in partitions using their native NTFS (NT File System) formatting. And if you install Linux in one of your partitions, you'll have to use its own special file system, known as Ext2. (Both PartitionMagic 6 and Partition Commander 6 include utilities that let you choose which of your operating systems to start up from.)
Packing Up Your Data
The more you use hard drives, the more fragmented they become, with bits of files scattered across the disk surfaces. Your drive's performance can slow down because the read/write heads have to travel all over the disk to pick up the requested data.
All versions of Windows come with basic disk-checking and defragmenting software, which you should set to run at least once a week using Windows' Task Scheduler. Commercial packages can do the job even faster and more efficiently. Advanced file check/repair programs and disk defragmenters are included in comprehensive utility packages such as McAfee Office ($69), Norton SystemWorks ($60), and Ontrack SystemSuite ($60). Another worthwhile option is Executive Software's Diskeeper ($50), a powerful stand-alone defragmenting utility.
--Stan Miastkowski
How Big Is Big?
Kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes...it's easy to get lost in the Greek of hard drive measurements. Here's a way you can translate huge numbers like 40GB into storage capacities you can visualize, to help you determine whether you could ever fill up one of today's monster hard drives.
First, consider the footprint of all your combined software. Figure on setting aside about half a gigabyte for an operating system: Windows Millennium Edition requires a minimum of 480MB, Windows 2000 demands at least 650MB, and a commercial Linux distribution, such as Red Hat Linux 7, takes up at least 500MB. Next, factor in your applications. The complete version of the Microsoft Office 2000 business suite, for example, consumes up to 626MB (and installing any software, be it an operating system or another application, requires room for temporary files that are created during the process). Even so, a couple of gigabytes should accommodate an average person's software complement. The rest of your disk space will be used for storing data such as documents, spreadsheets, images, video clips, and audio files. To judge how much room you'll need for your data files, consider what fits on a 40GB hard drive.
--Seán Captain
Expanding in a Small Space: Upgrading Your Notebook Drive
Plenty of us do some of our computing, or even all of it, on a notebook PC. And since our notebooks' drives are generally smaller than their desktop counterparts, they can fill up very quickly. Fortunately, do-it-yourself hard drive upgrades are now quite easy.
Unlike desktop hard drive vendors, notebook drive makers usually don't offer upgrade kits. In fact, the major vendors--Fujitsu, Hitachi, IBM, and Toshiba--sell very few drives directly to consumers. Instead, they supply them to other companies, which package kits for consumers. And while having a complete kit when upgrading a desktop is convenient, with a notebook it's essential.
The main challenge involves transferring data from the old drive to the new one. With a desktop, you can always leave your old drive attached (at least temporarily) to one of the system's IDE connections and simply use Windows Explorer to drag data files to the new drive. Or you can use a utility like PowerQuest's DriveCopy to make a perfect copy of your operating system, applications, and data.
That's not true with notebooks, since they generally have only one hard drive bay and one IDE connection (although some models allow you to drop a second hard drive into a multipurpose expansion bay). Upgrade kits from vendors such as Apricorn, Kingston, and Simple Technology solve the problem by using a PC Card to provide a second IDE connection.
I went through the surprisingly easy process using an IBM ThinkPad 600E notebook and an Apricorn Ez-Gig upgrade kit. Apricorn sent me a $446 kit containing the correct 12GB drive and the hardware and software I'd need.
Step 1: Transfer Data
Following Apricorn's written instructions, I first updated my notebook's BIOS (via a download from IBM's Web site) and got my old 6.5GB disk in shape by running Windows' Scandisk and Disk Defragmenter. Then I shut down the system, inserted the Ez-Gig PC Card, and attached it to the new drive via an included cable. Finally, I inserted the Apricorn boot floppy and powered up the system. The software identified my source (old) drive and my destination (new) drive, and then asked if I'd like to begin the transfer process. Fifty minutes later, 2.5GB of data from my old drive was in the new one.
Step 2: Replace the Drive
Next it was time for the physical transplant, which proved to be especially easy. My ThinkPad, like most newer notebook PCs, has an easy-to-access hard drive bay: I just removed one screw, popped off a plastic cover, and slid the old drive out (the IDE connector remained fixed inside the case). With older notebooks, you may have to open the entire unit to get at the drive.
After snapping in the new drive, I powered up and saw my familiar OS, applications, and data. Nothing had changed, it seemed, except that now I had a new drive with almost twice the capacity of the old one. In fact, by incorporating my old drive, too, I netted almost three times the original storage space: Using the PC Card and cable from the transfer operation, along with an included plastic case to house my old drive, I gained an external hard drive.
All that extra storage will keep me content for a long time, I hope. Did I mention the notebook's stereo speakers and my burgeoning MP3 collection?
--Seán Captain
Stan Miastkowski is a contributing editor and Seán Captain is an associate reviews editor for PC World.