Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 1TB HDD

With Deskstar 7K1000, Hitachi offers a hard disk drive with a whopping

storage capacity of 1 TB. So now you can have higher capacity NAS boxes with

sleek designs. New high capacity file servers could be built out of these. It

could even be used in disk-based backup appliances. This drive supports SATA II

specification, which enables it to deliver 3 Gbit/sec. It has a buffer memory of

32 MB, which reduces the number of accesses to the hard drive, thus improving

performance. Hitachi 7K1000 uses Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR)

technique, wherein the data bits are arranged perpendicular to the disk's

platter, as against the lateral alignment of bits in legacy drives. This allows

higher capacity drives to be built within the same form factor. Actually, it's a

931.5 GB hard disk, as your OS will report this much only, because the system

uses the binary approach where 1 KB equals 1024 Bytes and not 1000 Bytes, as

used by vendors.

This drive gives silent acoustics performance and has 3 low power-idle modes

to boost power efficiency. Hitachi has used five platters for the 7K1000, each

having about 200 GB of storage capacity.

As for the performance, we tested it on an Athlon FX 55 based machine with

512 MB DDR RAM. We ran the Business Disk and High-end Disk Winmark tests of the

WinBench99 suite, which are used to check a drive's throughput for business

productivity and high-end applications, wherein it scored 18.2 MBps and 44.2

MBps, which are far better than Seagate's Barracuda ES 750 GB drive (reviewed in

August 2006) that had scored 18.3 Mbps and 28 Mbps, in these two tests. Besides,

this drive also gave a lower (better) access time of 11.4 ms as against 12.6 ms

of Seagate's 750 GB drive.

As this being the first 1 TB HDD, we ran other benchmark tests also apart

from WinBench 99 suite. This HDD gave an average transfer rate of 70MB/s, which

is good. Quite impressively, the tests showed its burst rate speed to be at

200MB/s, thanks to the 32 MB buffer memory (see performance chart).

The usage of five platters affects the drive's response time but, it

increases the opertaing temperature. The drive temperature reached upto 590C,

when we were running these tests.

Bottom Line: It's a good buy for anyone who is looking for one high capacity

drive.