Hitachi Deskstar 7K400 seamless streaming ability, is it as good as it sounds?

[coolred]

For those that don't know, in Hitachis latest drive they packed a whopping 400GB into it. But they also added some features, one being what they call seamless streaming. They know that more and more hard drives are making there ways into DVR's and MP3 players, supposedly what this seamless streaming does is very helpful in these applications.

Basically with computer data, integrity is top priority. Where as with streaming video or audio, keep the rate up is a bit more important. Basically think of it this way, woudl you rather have a few pixels missing, or would you rather have a 1 second skip in the video. With normal hard drives, if an error occurs during reading, the drive drops the data and goes back around and rereads it. This would cause the lag in video and audio. This new technology causes the drive to almost ignore the error and keep reading, thus only losing a few pixels or possiblly adding some other artifacts to a frame


Anywas I am planning on building a dedicated PVR and this technology seems intriging. But I will admit i don't know too much about, just the basic concept as I spoke of earlier. Does anyone know how well this works or even if its really nessecary, or is it just marketing hype?

 

[DaveSimmons]

My guess: pointless unless the drive is dying on you.

Any recent drive has the sustained transfer to support 10-20 max bitrate DVD streams (double or triple that for average bitrate) and to saturate a couple of 100 mbit network cards.

On the other hand, I could use a couple of those 400 GB drives for their capacity, so I can keep all of my folk/pop/rock CDs on one drive (in FLAC format) instead of splitting them across a pair of 250 GB maxtors.