Hitachi Ultrastar 300 GB Hard Drive

This hard disk is both statistically and visually very fast. You can, thus, actually see your files and programs open faster. Strangely, we found its Business Disk Winmarks much lower than that for the same model of lower capacity (75 GB) which we tested in our August 2003 hard disk shootout-the older one had given us 11 MB/sec and this disk ran around at a mere 6.9 MB/sec. Disk access time was high at 8 ms-higher than the 5.79 ms we saw with the Seagate Cheetah 140 GB drive reviewed in March 2005. CPU utilization remains high at 91.8%, but lower than the 94% for the Cheetah. High-end Business Disk Winmarks topped the charts at 22 MB/sec. The raw throughputs of the drive were pretty good, starting at 72.5 MB/sec and tailing off around 48.6 MB/sec. Our test bed was a typical dual processor Xeon server with 512 MB RAM. We used a 64-bit dual channel Ultra 320 SCSI (Adaptec) card that we received with the disk to plug it in.

The disk was detected and no additional drivers were needed for either Windows or Linux. This makes it a great disk to purchase for a regular file or database server.

The Bottom Line:

For its price tag, the cost per GB works out at Rs 200 per GB which is lower than the Rs 270 per GB we saw with its earlier model as well as the Rs 464 per GB for the Cheetah 140 GB. Thus, the price is well worth the performance.

Sujay V Sarma