Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000

The Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000 drive provides users a large 3TB data storage room and 64 MB of cache buffer rather than 32 MB used in predecessors. The overall technical specifications of this drive is almost identical to the Seagate Barracuda XT 3TB drive (reviewed this month), which is also contains five 600 GB platters, and runs on the latest SATA 6GB/s interface with a spindle speed of 7200 RPM. The limitation of this drive is the same as Barracuda XT, ie you cannot use this drive over a Windows XP-based machine, neither as a primary boot nor as secondary. But you are free to use Deskstar's full capacity on a Windows 7 or Vista-based machine as long as GUID partition is enabled.

We tested this drive on the same machine on which we have tested Barracuda XT, that is AMD Phenom II X4 965 @ 3.4GHz with 4GB RAM. We ran the HD Tune benchmark, it provided an average transfer rate of 113.9 MB/sec with an access time of 16ms which is very good. On comparing with Barracuda XT 3TB, we didn't find a significantly large difference in their scores because both drives are using identical specifications. However, the burst rate achieved by the Deskstar is 315.5 MB/s which is higher than Seagate's 3TB drive. Burst rate reflects the data transfer speed from the drive's interface to the operating system.

Bottomline: With its massive capacity and performance, the Deskstar 7K3000 is a worthy buy for organizations looking for high capacity drives.