Hitachi DeskStar 7K1000 1TB 3.5 inch HDD Review

Today we are going to have a look at the biggest freakin’ drive you can currently get your hands on to go inside your PC. The Hitachi 1TB SATA 3.0GB/s 3.5” hard drive is the HD video and music lovers dream, enough space for your collection and room to grow on for most of us. Read on to see how well the Hitachi DeskStar 7K1000 1TB HDD performs.

Gallery

5 images

Benchmarks

Features & Specifications
Hitachi beat everyone to market with their 1TB HDD, other drive makers are on there heels though and over the next year we should see more manufactures hitting the 1TB mark. It seems like only yesterday when I bought my first computer with a HDD inside that was measured in mere megabytes. Now I own flash drives with more storage space than a fleet of those vintage rigs.

The Hitachi DeskStar 7K1000 1TB HDD uses the familiar 3.5” form factor and spins at 7,200 rpm. The drive uses the SATA 3.0 GB/s interface, though if your mainboard doesn’t support that speed you can configure the drive to run at the older, slower SATA speed. Hitachi claims seek times of 8.5ms read and 9.2ms write and the drive uses perpendicular recording technology. Once I formatted the drive with NTFS on XP Pro the Hitachi DeskStar 7K1000 1TB HDD had 931 GB of usable storage space.

Test Machine
For this review I put the Hitachi DeskStar 7K1000 1TB HDD in my standard test machine with the following specifications:

• CPU- Intel QX6700
• RAM- PNY XLR8 2GB DDR2 RAM
• OS- Windows XP Pro SP2
• Mainboard- XFX 680i
• Video- XFX 8800 Ultra XXX
• Display- Dell 30” UltraSharp 3007WFP-HC LCD

Testing & Benchmarks
To test the performance of the Hitachi DeskStar 7K1000 1TB HDD I used SiSoftware Sandra Lite XI, HD Tach and I copied files to the drive and timed the speed with a stop watch.

HD Tach
The first test up was with HD Tach which gave a random access time of 12.8 ms for the Hitachi DeskStar 7K1000 1TB HDD. To compare the random access time for my Raptor HDD is 8.8 seconds. The average read speed for the Hitachi DeskStar 7K1000 1TB HDD was recorded as 72.6 MB/s and my Raptor HDD scored a average read speed of 61.6 MB/s. As you can see the Hitachi DeskStar 7K1000 1TB HDD is a bit slower and the random access time, but significantly faster on the average read speed than the Raptor.

Sandra XI
Next up was benchmarking with Sandra XI using the Physical disks benchmark. This test showed a drive index of 79 MB/s for the Hitachi DeskStar 7K1000 1TB HDD and drive index of 63 MB/s for the Raptor. The random access time for the Hitachi DeskStar 7K1000 1TB HDD was 13ms with the Raptor scoring a random access time of 8ms. Again the Hitachi DeskStar 7K1000 1TB HDD is a bit slower on random access, but much faster on read speeds than the Raptor.

Moving Files
For the final test of the Hitachi DeskStar 7K1000 1TB HDD I took a folder containing 1.34Gb of data and copied it from my Raptor internal drive to the Hitachi DeskStar drive 7K1000 1TB HDD. It took 1 minute and 18 seconds to write the folder to the Hitachi drive. Reading the same folder from the Hitachi drive and writing it back to the Raptor took 50 seconds and deleting the file from the Hitachi 1TB drive took slightly less than three seconds.

Final Thoughts
The Hitachi DeskStar 7K1000 1TB HDD is without a doubt one of the fastest hard drives on the planet and is without a doubt the highest capacity single hard drive around. If you have gobs of digital music, photos, video and software that you install on your computer, the Hitachi DeskStar 7K1000 1TB HDD is one of the best drives for you to upgrade to. In my testing I didn’t find the drive to be particularly noisy, certainly no noisier than my Raptor drive. I think that someone wanting a large capacity drive for use in a media center PC would very much like the Hitachi DeskStar 7K1000 1TB HDD as well.

Verdict

Conclusion

Pros

• Huge storage capacity
• Faster than a 10k RPM Raptor in several tests

Cons

• Expensive

Verdict
After all the testing, I think that even though the Raptor 10k RPM drive I have has a slightly faster random access time, most users will never notice that difference. The huge storage capacity gap between the Raptor and the 7K1000 pushes the DeskStar over the top in a landslide. If you want the biggest, and nearly the fastest drive around the Hitachi DeskStar 7K1000 1TB HDD is where you want to spend your cash.

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