Hitachi is a globally recognized brand name with products available for just about every facet of life. From industrial machinery to home appliances, their list of products is about as diverse as you will find. The company was founded in 1910 as a mere electrical repair shop, and quickly grew to include the manufacture of electric motors.
The growth obviously continued over the decades, and in 2003 a new piece was added to their extensive line up. Hitachi Global Storage Technologies was launched at this point with the combination of IBM's storage technology business with Hitachi's existing storage division. Hitachi now "offers customers a comprehensive product portfolio unsurpassed in the industry – including 1-inch, 1.8-inch, 2.5-inch, and 3.5-inch hard disk drive storage devices and solutions for a broad range of market segments."
The product provided for this review is from their Global Storage Technolgies unit, and is just about the largest and fastest hard drive you are going to find for a desktop computer. The Hitachi Deskstar 7K500 SATA-II drive, model HDS725050KLA360, is a 7200 RPM SATA-II (3.0 Gb/s) hard drive boasting a massive capacity of 500GB, a cache memory of 16MB, and support for native command queuing (NCQ).
Specifications:
Before jumping into the actual performance, let's look at Hitachi's published data on the Deskstar 7K500.
| Deskstar Model |
HDS725050KLA360 |
| Configuration |
|
| Interface |
SATA 3.0Gb/s |
| Capacity (GB) |
500 |
| Data heads (physical) |
5/10 |
| Performance |
|
| Data buffer (MB) |
16 |
| Rotational speed (RPM) |
7200 |
| Media transfer rate (max. Mbits/sec) |
817 |
| Interface transfer rate (max. MB/sec) |
300 |
| Sustained data rate (MB/sec) |
64.8 - 31 (zone 0 - 29) |
| Seek time average, (read, typical (MS)) |
8.5 |
| Reliability |
|
| Error rate (non-recoverable) |
1 in 10E14 |
| Start/stops (at 40° C) |
50,000 |
| Acoustic |
|
| Idle (Bels) |
3.1 |
| Power |
|
| Requirement |
+5 VDC (+/- 5%), +12 VDC (+10%/-8%) |
| Startup current (max. A) |
2.0 (+12V) & 1.2 (+5V) |
| Idle (W) |
9.6 |
| Physical size |
|
| Height (mm) |
25.4 |
| Width (mm) |
101.6 |
| Depth (mm) |
146 |
| Weight (max. g) |
700 |
| Environmental characteristics |
Operating |
| Ambient temperature |
5° to 55° C |
| Relative humidity (non-condensing |
8% to 90% |
| Shock (half sine wave, 2ms) |
55G |
| Vibration (random (RMS) |
0.67G for horizontal, 0.56G for vertical |
| Environmental characteristics |
Non-operating |
| Ambient temperature |
-40° to 65° C |
| Relative humidity (non-condensing |
5% to 95% |
| Shock (half sine wave, 2ms) |
225G |
| Vibration (random (RMS) |
1.04 (XYZ) |
| RoHS compliant |
Yes |
The specifications for this drive are quite impressive. 500 GB of disk space, 16 MB of cache memory, and 3.0 Gbps of transfer speeds are about as good as you are going to get in today's hard drives. The only category that might be rivaled is transfer speed, but that would require a pricy Ultra320 SCSI drive to do so. Testing the performance of the Hitachi 7K500 will be very interesting, and as a point of reference we will put it head-to-head with some drives from Seagate's current line-up.
One thing you don't see in the table above is details on the warranty. This simple bit of information seemed a bit hard to come by. The drive doesn't say, the packaging doesn't say, and what the manual says is that "Deskstar Products, all 8MB cache buffer models: 3 years" and "Deskstar Products, all 512K or 2MB cache buffer models: 1 year." Browsing the Hitachi website tells me "Deskstar Products - 3 years after April 25, 2005", which didn't help since the sample was stamped as being manufactured in March 2005. Even trying to check via serial number, as if I wanted to start an RMA, returned an error that this was not a valid serial number to file a claim against. Hmm... It might be a safe guess that this has a 3 year warranty, but it would be nice if the information was readily available.
Please read on to the next page for more... Next
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