[Eugene]

Through its unique five-platter assembly, Hitachi Global Storage is the first manufacturer to hit the prestigious one-terabyte mark with the remarkable Deskstar 7K1000. How does it stack up? Join StorageReview as we pit Hitachi's giant against the best that the SATA interface has to offer.

Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 Review

[KingGremlin]

Quote

Posted May 29th, 2007 by eugene

Wow, this drive is so fast, it sent Eugene into the future! Seriously though, nice drive. I know what the benchmarks say, but do you think this drive would really be faster than the Raptor in "real world" computers. ie... ones that aren't run off a clean image every time you boot up? Imagine one of these about half full with a typical amount of fragmentation for a home user, and I picture a drive that won't come close to the results it posted in this review. Obviously the Raptor would suffer performance degradation as well, but one would think it would be to a lower degree. Any thoughts?

[Spod]

Where's the quick reply option for the Article Discussion forum?

KingGremlin, you could always partition off the first 150 GB of the drive to reduce the spread of important OS & app files across the disk, then use the rest for bulk data storage.

It would be interesting to find out if a RAID 0 of two Raptor 150s (or OS on one Raptor, games & data on another) worked out faster than a single 7K1000, given the price. Of course, you'd still be about 700 GB short in the capacity department!

[Olaf van der Spek]

Quote

With a 43.5 dB/A objectively-measured noise floor, the Deskstar T7K500 does not break any records when it comes to idle noise.

What about the 7K1000?

Quote

Under a full seek, the drive's actuator chatter is noticeable, perhaps slightly louder than perhaps slightly louder than the Barracuda's and Raptor's output but not overly heavy in any way.

[whiic]

Don't forget to add 7K1000 to Performance Database. Unlike as usual, this time review was out before database entry.

[j3pflynn]

How is the 750GB version likely to compare?

[whiic]

And how are the scores with NCQ disabled? It beats Raptor with NCQ enabled but I would assume it would fare even batter in Single-User Suite if it was disabled.

7K1000 versus 7200.10 750GB (or more accurately it's identical twin: ES 750)... I think when the difference between closest competitors (capacitywise) is this big, it's obvious there'll be a noticeable difference in performance (if you have fast enough system to bottleneck the HDD).
Office: 917 vs 575. High-end: 735 vs 535. Farcry: 877 vs 671. Sims 2: 962 vs 645. WoW: 741 vs 485.
59%, 37%, 31%, 49% and 53% performance edge over competition, respectively.

History repeats itself. 2nd gen Kurofune vs. 2nd Raptor. 3rd gen Kurofune vs. 3rd gen Raptor.

[Stele]

Great review! And a major relief to finally see one on a desktop drive after half a year~ as usual, kudos to SR for another quality effort. The 1TB drive may be bleeding edge, but imho the 750GB probably offers greater bang for the buck (at this level anyway).

whiic, on May 28 2007, 11:54 PM, said:

History repeats itself. 2nd gen Kurofune vs. 2nd Raptor. 3rd gen Kurofune vs. 3rd gen Raptor.

I wonder why Hitachi keeps two lines of high-cap drives (Kurofone and Vancouver) instead of merging them together; or is Kurofone specifically for 5-platter designs only? Otherwise they could use the Kurofone platform and just lose the platters as needed, as per usual - after all, IIRC Vancouver uses a newer (?) DSP.

Hopefully the 7K1000 series proves to be reliable - that's an awful lots of eggs in one basket, as far as data storage is concerned. As it is, for some reason, Hitachi T7K500 and 7K500 drives appear to take quite some fire over reliability issues from user reviews at various online vendors compared to WD or Seagate.

[ehurtley]

FINALLY! Excellent review, by the way.

But I do have one question about another front page news item. The mention that the Atlases got tested, but "never quite got the go-ahead from the manufacturer for a formal review." Uh, they sent it to a review site, the drives are out in the wild, so any NDA will have expired. Even if you got them direct from Maxtor, unless to get them you signed an NDA with no end date (which aren't even enforceable,) then you're clear to publish the review. And if you got them from a public source (like a distributor,) and never signed ANYTHING with the manufacturer, then you're well within your rights to publish a review.

[Stele]

Olaf van der Spek, on May 28 2007, 01:46 AM, said:

Quote

With a 43.5 dB/A objectively-measured noise floor, the Deskstar T7K500 does not break any records when it comes to idle noise.

What about the 7K1000?

Quote

Under a full seek, the drive's actuator chatter is noticeable, perhaps slightly louder than perhaps slightly louder than the Barracuda's and Raptor's output but not overly heavy in any way.

Hehehe
That aside, perhaps SR could make greater use of their noise-measuring setup by adding a condenser microphone right next to their sound meter to record a clip of the HDD's noise, with, for example, the first 3 seconds of the clip recording with the drive powered off (to give an idea of the ambient noise), then recording the noise of the drive as it goes through its power on, idle and seek stages during the usual objective sound pressure level meter measurements.

That, imho, might be a good complement to SR's subjective comments as well as the objective sound pressure level meter readings, since the meter readings may not be able to indentify the strong presence of particular (and potentially annoying) frequencies - which a sound recording could. Frostytech.com does this for their heatsink reviews, for instance. It's not perfect, but it's a useful relative measure between HDDs and works along the same lines as "a picture is worth a thousand words"