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Hitachi Deskstar SATA Hard Drives

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PCQ Bureau
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We've seen a lot of action in the hard drives industry in the recent past. Though there are only a few players, the competition in this business, especially for the desktop drives is tough. Due to this, the manufacturers keep introducing something new or the other to outdo each other. 

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The current trend is to go high-capacity and provide the latest SATA II interface, which takes the burst transfer rate up to 3 Gbps from the current 1.5 Gbps. Keeping with the trend, Hitachi has recently launched its Deskstar range of high capacity 400 GB SATA-I and 500 GB SATA II hard disks. Such high-capacities are suited for people with high-end PC configurations who have lots of data to store such as videos, songs, heavy graphics, etc. 

Alternately, the drives could also be used in entry-level file servers or even NAS boxes. Both drives have a spindle speed of 7200 rpm each. The 400 GB model has 8 MB buffer

memory, while the 500 GB one has that of 16 MB. 

In the 7K500, support for SATA II isn't provided by default. You have to install a utility to activate it, which comes bundled with the drive. Also, SATA II is currently available only a few select boards. We tested it on a Gigabyte GA-GA8I945GMF, which supports SATA II owing to its onboard Intel ICH7 controller. The remaining configuration comprised of an Intel P4 3.0 GHz, 256 MB RAM, and running Win XP Pro with SP1. 

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The only setback we received was that our benchmarks didn't show any performance different between SATA I and SATA II. In the rest of the results, the SATA II drive did very well. In fact, both drives did better than the Western Digital drive we tested sometime back as can be seen from the table that is given below. The 7K500 hard drive showed a throughput that was at least 4 Mbps higher than the Western Digital disk in High-end and business disk

winmarks.

Bottom Line: Overall, both drives are worth buying owing to their

high-capacity and good performance. But we didn't see a point of buying them for their SATA interface, as we didn't find any

notable difference.

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