Introduction

Before we continue with the review, here is a little history about Hitachi Global Storage Technologies:

"Hitachi Global Storage Technologies was founded in 2003 and was formed as a result of the strategic combination of IBM and HitachiÙs storage technology businesses. Storage is one of HitachiÙs five core businesses; substantial technology and financial resources have been committed to ensure a successful and profitable business. The companyÙs vision is to enable users to fully engage in the digital lifestyle by providing access to large amounts of storage capacity in formats suitable for the office, on the road and in the home. Hitachi Global Storage Technologies is positioned to immediately advance the role of hard disk drives beyond traditional computing environments to consumer electronics and other emerging applications."

Hitachi are determined to kick up a storm with this drive, so let's see how it performs. 

Features  

Hitachi 7K1000

Hitachi 7K1000

The Deskstar 7K1000 has five platters each of 200GB and 10 heads taking care of  the read/write routine. Other features are pretty standard - SATA 3.0 Gb/s interface, 7200rpm rotational speed, 3.5 inch form factor. This hard drive has a 32MB data buffer as compared to the 16MB and 8MB buffers in smaller capacity drives.
The 7K1000's enormous storage capacity is made possible with the move to Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR) technology instead of Longitudinal Recording. PMR technology was invented to overcome the constraints imposed by the superparamagnetic effect which occurs when the microscopic magnetic grains on the disk become so small that the ambient temperature can ultimately result in loss of data.

As its name indicates, longitudinal recording aligns the data bits horizontally, parallel to the surface of the disk. In contrast, perpendicular recording aligns bits vertically, perpendicular to the disk. In this orientation materials and smaller crystalline grains can be used wherein it is harder to reverse the magnetic orientation, resulting in smaller physical bits that are still stable at room temperature.

One issue that will confuse many buyers is that you will not be getting the 1 Terabyte of storage after formatting as advertised. This is because of two reasons. Firstly, Hard drive manufacturers define "terabyte" as 1012 bytes where as the Operating System calculates 1 terabyte as 240 bytes. Secondly, upon formatting, the OS takes up some space on the hard drive. Hence, you end up with about 935GB of usable space after formatting. Still enough to hold about 225,000 MP3s!

Unique to Hitachi drives, the Deskstar 7K1000 features three advanced low-power idle modes – active, unload and low-power. Together, they reduce power consumption at the drive level up to 20%, optimize non-operational latency and lower drive temperature for cooler system operation Through a patented ramp load/unload design disk heads (in non-operating modes) ar unloaded to a ramp outside the disk where they rest in a low-power ‘unload idleÙ state until activated. In low RPM drives, this can reduce power by up to 50%. Ramp load/unload provides tangible benefits for the drive and host product. It greatly minimizes the riskof shock damage by eliminating direct contact between the heads and disks. Reduced wear and heat improve overall drive reliability. In the event of power loss to the drive, heads are unloaded using energy extracted from the spinning disks. This patented power-saving feature helps to reduce overall maintenance costs and extends the drive service life.

Another contributor to Deskstar 7K1000Ùs exceptional shock performance and power savings is the use of compact, low-mass femto air-bearing sliders An integrated thermal sensor monitors operating temperature, enabling the host processor to intelligently adjust airflow as needed for cooling. Sensor integration reduces component cost and increases reliability.Deskstar 7K1000Ùs thermal fly-height control (TFC) uses an integrated heating element to precisely maintain a constant fly-height throughout read and write operations. This reduces raw soft error rate and, in turn, improves overall data integrity, drive performance and reliability Deskstar 7K1000Ùs iridium-manganese chromium (IrMnCr) read head sensor technolog offers better performance and reliability in harsh conditions.

Specifications

Interface: Serial ATA 3.0 Gb/s

Capacity: 1 TB
Sector size: 512 bytes
Disks: 5
Heads: 10

Data buffer: 32 MB
Rotational speed: 7200 RPM
Media transfer rate (max): 1070 Mb/s
Interface transfer rate (max): 300 MB/s
Latency: 4.17 ms (average, 7200 RPM)
Seek time: 8.5 ms read (typical), 9.2 ms write (typical)
Silent-seek time: 14 ms read (typical), 15 ms write (typical)

Error rate (non-recoverable): 1 per 1.0 E15 bits transferred
Load/unload cycles (at 40°C): 50,000
Warranty: 3 years

Power Supply: +5 VDC (+/- 5%), +12 VDC (+10% / -8%)
Start up current (max): 2.0 A (+12V), 1.2 A (+5V)
Random read/write (average): 13.6 W
Silent read/write (average): 10.8 W
Idle (average): 9.0 W
Unload idle: 6.9 W
Low RPM idle: 4.5 W

Acoustics Idle: 2.9 bels (typical)
Silent seek, Seek: 3.0 bels (typical), 3.2 bels (typical)

Physical Dimensions: H (26.1 mm) x W (101.6 mm) x D (147 mm)
Weight (max): 700 g

Temperature: 5 to 60 °C operating, -40 to 70 °C non-operating
Relative humidity (non-condensing): 8 to 90% operating, 5 to 95% non-operating
RoHS4 compliant: Yes

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

TrackBack URI for this entry

Comments (0)

Subscribe to this comment's feed

Show/Hide comments

Show/Hide comment form