Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000: Terabyte Storage arrives on the Desktop
by Gary Key on March 19, 2007 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Quick Take
Our limited experiences to date with the Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 have been terrific and beyond expectations. The overall performance of this drive has been phenomenal and is close enough to the WD1500ADFD Raptor drive that we consider it a worthy adversary. The Raptors are still the drives to own for benchmarking but this drive is a better overall performance value. In fact, based upon subjective testing we could seriously consider tossing this drive into the same performance sector as the WD Raptor when utilized in the typical gaming or enthusiast level machine where this drive will likely find a home.
We found the overall write performance and sustained transfer rates to be excellent and class leading in several of our test results to date. The drive even has the best overall thermal and acoustic characteristics of the high performance 7200rpm drives and absolutely blows away the Raptors in this respect. Of course, the 7K1000 does not have to contend with 10,000 rpm spindle speeds and firmware that is generally designed to extract the greatest amount of performance from the drive. However, considering the drive has a five platter design we think Hitachi has done a wonderful job in controlling thermals.
Hitachi's implementation of their Automatic Acoustic Management technology on the 7K1000 does not hinder performance in a noticeable manner and offers a significant advantage for those needing a spacious drive in a silent system. We cannot wait to test the CinemaStar version of this drive that will be designed with DVR operations in mind but for now our HTPC test bed has found a new drive. As stated in the article, we believe leaving AAM and NCQ turned on provides the best performance experience with this drive. While there may be a very slight performance advantage in certain benchmarks with AAM off (NCQ also), we feel like the benefits of having a near silent 1TB drive in our system is well worth the price of losing a few benchmark points.
The Deskstar 7K1000 is not without faults. We did find in our Nero Recode tests and to some degree in our Winstone tests that the drive does not perform as well as expected in handling large block sizes of data in sequential order. The Achilles heel of the Seagate 750GB drive was its inability to handle large files in non-sequential order. Hitachi has overcome this for this most part with a large 32 MB cache and from all apparent indications firmware that is tuned with operational balance in mind or even favoring non-sequential read/writes. A luxury it can afford due to its cache size and areal density advantages over the other drives in our test group.
Overall, we think Hitachi's Deskstar 7K1000 is the best 7200rpm drive we have tested to date. This is quite the accomplishment considering this is Hitachi's first 3.5-inch form factor drive that utilizes perpendicular recording technology. We still have significant testing left to complete on this drive that includes our full IPEAK and Application test suite with AAM and NCQ turned off or on along with RAID testing but we do not expect to find any surprises at this time. With an expected retail price of $399 or $0.40 per-Gigabyte this makes the 7K1000 a true value considering its size and performance. For these reasons, we highly recommend the purchase of this drive if you are currently looking for a high-capacity drive with performance to match.
We would like to thank Dell once again for providing our test samples and encourage you to visit StudioDell or take a look at the systems currently shipping with this impressive drive.
Our limited experiences to date with the Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 have been terrific and beyond expectations. The overall performance of this drive has been phenomenal and is close enough to the WD1500ADFD Raptor drive that we consider it a worthy adversary. The Raptors are still the drives to own for benchmarking but this drive is a better overall performance value. In fact, based upon subjective testing we could seriously consider tossing this drive into the same performance sector as the WD Raptor when utilized in the typical gaming or enthusiast level machine where this drive will likely find a home.
We found the overall write performance and sustained transfer rates to be excellent and class leading in several of our test results to date. The drive even has the best overall thermal and acoustic characteristics of the high performance 7200rpm drives and absolutely blows away the Raptors in this respect. Of course, the 7K1000 does not have to contend with 10,000 rpm spindle speeds and firmware that is generally designed to extract the greatest amount of performance from the drive. However, considering the drive has a five platter design we think Hitachi has done a wonderful job in controlling thermals.
Hitachi's implementation of their Automatic Acoustic Management technology on the 7K1000 does not hinder performance in a noticeable manner and offers a significant advantage for those needing a spacious drive in a silent system. We cannot wait to test the CinemaStar version of this drive that will be designed with DVR operations in mind but for now our HTPC test bed has found a new drive. As stated in the article, we believe leaving AAM and NCQ turned on provides the best performance experience with this drive. While there may be a very slight performance advantage in certain benchmarks with AAM off (NCQ also), we feel like the benefits of having a near silent 1TB drive in our system is well worth the price of losing a few benchmark points.
The Deskstar 7K1000 is not without faults. We did find in our Nero Recode tests and to some degree in our Winstone tests that the drive does not perform as well as expected in handling large block sizes of data in sequential order. The Achilles heel of the Seagate 750GB drive was its inability to handle large files in non-sequential order. Hitachi has overcome this for this most part with a large 32 MB cache and from all apparent indications firmware that is tuned with operational balance in mind or even favoring non-sequential read/writes. A luxury it can afford due to its cache size and areal density advantages over the other drives in our test group.
Overall, we think Hitachi's Deskstar 7K1000 is the best 7200rpm drive we have tested to date. This is quite the accomplishment considering this is Hitachi's first 3.5-inch form factor drive that utilizes perpendicular recording technology. We still have significant testing left to complete on this drive that includes our full IPEAK and Application test suite with AAM and NCQ turned off or on along with RAID testing but we do not expect to find any surprises at this time. With an expected retail price of $399 or $0.40 per-Gigabyte this makes the 7K1000 a true value considering its size and performance. For these reasons, we highly recommend the purchase of this drive if you are currently looking for a high-capacity drive with performance to match.
We would like to thank Dell once again for providing our test samples and encourage you to visit StudioDell or take a look at the systems currently shipping with this impressive drive.
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goldfish2 - Tuesday, March 20, 2007 - link
just noticed a problem you may wish to address with your charts, hope this hasn't already been mentioned.Take a look at the chart 'video application timing - time to transcode DVD'
Your times are in Minutes/seconds, it seems you're chart application has interpreted the numbers as decimals, and made the bar lengths on this basis. Take a look at the bar for WD5000YS 500GB. It says 4.59; I assume this means 4 minutes 59 seconds, making the WD740GD 2 seconds slower at 5 minutes 1 second. But the bar lengths are scaled for decimal, so that the bar on the WD740GD is much longer. You'll have to see if you can get your graph package to think in minutes:seconds, or have the bar lengths entered in decimal (i.e. 4:30 seconds becomes 4.5 minutes) and put a label on in minutes for readability.
Thanks for the review though.
Gary Key - Tuesday, March 20, 2007 - link
We have a short blurb under the Application Performance section -"Our application benchmarks are designed to show application performance results with times being reported in minutes / seconds or seconds only, with lower scores being better. Our graph engine does not allow for a time format such a 1:05 (one minute, five seconds) so this time value will be represented as 1.05."
We know this is an issue and hopefully we can address it in our next engine update (coming soon from what I understand). I had used percentage values in a previous article that was also confusing to some degree. Thanks for the comments and they have been passed on to our web team. ;)
PrinceGaz - Tuesday, March 20, 2007 - link
The simplest and most logical solution is just to enter the time in seconds, rather than minutes and seconds; even if graphed correctly, comparing values composed of two units (minutes:seconds) is difficult compared to a single unit (seconds).If two results were 6:47 and 7:04 for instance, the difference betweem them is much clearer if you say 407 and 424 seconds. By giving the value in seconds only, you can see at a glance that there is a 17 second difference, which translates to just over 4% (17 divided by 407/100, or 17 divided by about 4.1).
Doing the same mental calculation with 6:47 and 7:04 first involves working out the difference with the extra step of dealing with 60 seconds to a minute. Then you have a difference of 17 seconds out of a little under 7 minutes, which isn't very helpful until you convert the 7 minutes to seconds, as it should have been originally.
That's my opinion anyway.
JarredWalton - Tuesday, March 20, 2007 - link
Hi Gary. I told you so! Damned if you do, damned if you don't. ;) (The rest of you can just ignore me.)PrinceGaz - Tuesday, March 20, 2007 - link
How can you say only two years?
The 14 years you say it took to increase from 1GB to 500GB represents a doubling of capacity nine times, or roughly 1.56 years (19 months) for the capacity to double. That means that the two years (actually 20 months as Hitachi released a 500GB drive in Jul 2005) it took to double again, from 500GB to 1TB is actually marginally longer than average.
It would be more accurate to say that the trend of capacities doubling roughly every 18 months is continuing.
patentman - Tuesday, March 20, 2007 - link
The two year remark is two years from the first commercial perpendicular recording drive. Perpendicular recording has been in the works for a long time. In fact, when I used to examine patent applications for a living, there was patent literature related to perpendicular recording all the way back in 1990-1991, albeit for relatively simple aspects of the device.Gary Key - Tuesday, March 20, 2007 - link
The averaging of the time periods does work out to a doubling of capacities every 18~20 months but the last doubling took about 26 months to go from 250GB to 500GB.
mino - Wednesday, March 21, 2007 - link
Yes, but first 250GB drives were 4-platter 5400rpm ones(Maxtor?)...First 500GB were 5-platter 7200rpm ones.
IMO there are little dicrepancies in the tren dcaused bu the worry of many-platter drives after 75GXP. Aftre a few years Hitachi came back with 7K400 and the curve just returned to values it lost before...
scott967 - Tuesday, March 20, 2007 - link
On these big drives is NTFS performance an issue at all?scott s.
.
AbRASiON - Monday, March 19, 2007 - link
Too slow, too much money, too little space.I've owned 3 and sold them.
When are we going to see a 15krpm Savvio 2.5" review?
When will we see a 180gb per platter 32mb 10,000rpm new series raptor?
Maybe WD should also make a 15krpm 2.5" - 32mb model
These incrimental speed upgrades on hard disks are terrible :( need more, much much more.