In The Labs

We slipped the Hitachi into our MaXit Monsta - a quad core, 8800GTX, 680i Striker mean machine - to see how it compared with our current favourite speed demon, the Western Digital 10,000RPM 160GB raptor drive. An unfair advantage to the smaller drive eh? You can imagine our suprise when the Deskstar 7K1000 simply blew it away in the HDTach benchmark.

Hitachi 7K1000

Sisoft Sandra confirmed similar victories to the Hitachi Deskstar but without boring you with a million and one simulated tests, we thought we'd tell you how it performed in real use. The simple answer is stunning. The drive is one the fastest units we have ever had the pleasure of testing and combined with serious applications such as Adobe Photoshop CS3, it was a joy to use. Large 120meg psds opened almost instantly. In fact if you do any image manipulation or video editing, this baby is for you. We chucked some games on the drive and found load times where faster than our 10K raptor. BioShock ran smooth as silk in Vista and direct X10 with super fast load times.

Acoustic and Thermal Performance

I should say I am pretty impressed with the acoustic performance of this drive. The noise levels under idle conditions as well as under load are less than the noise levels of some smaller capacity hard drives. When running some benchmarks there was an audible noise of the disks spinning but never enough to become obtrusive. Popping it inside our noise reduction hard drive caddy and it became silent while still running well within operating temperatures.

The temperatures levels are also pretty impressive for drive with 5 platters. Idle temperatures are around 35C and under load, they reached upto 45C but with proper front cooling on the case, the temperatures can be lowered by 3 to 5C if you really like to run your drives cool.

The Bottom Line

We were gobsmacked by the performance of the Deskstar 7K1000. It's a seriously quick drive. The performance is no doubt thanks in part to the 32MB on board data buffer. Unfortunately, we couldn't test the performance of this drive in RAID 0 but can only imagine how well it would perform as a dedicated setup for Vista or XP rigs. Hitachi have gone all out to produce an oustanding hard drive. In fact it's so good we recommend throwing away your Raptors for a couple of these babies. The massive amount of storage space and ultra quiet performance is the icing on the cake satisfying demands for high powered multimedia machines with ease, not to mention bragging rights down at the local. If you're in the market for some big storage, the Deskstar should be your first port of call.

Nice one Hitachi!

The Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 hard drive receives our Editors Choice Gold Award for an outstanding product.

Pros

Cons

So good you'll need to buy two.

Special thanks to Hitachi UK for supplying this drive for evaluation. For more details of full range of storage solutions from Hitachi, please visit their website at www.hitachigst.com

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