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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phusg - Tuesday, March 20, 2007 - link
I think you are right, but don't forget that in this post you are only looking at it from a performance viewpoint. Drive longevity and acoustics are major factors to me, and I think for you too from the article. I think these are the metrics worth looking at and tend to agree that subjective performance doesn't really differentiate that much (although I haven't had half as much experience with different vendors/models as you have).gramboh - Monday, March 19, 2007 - link
I read the review earlier this morning but don't recall seeing anything about retail channel availability. Did Hitachi or Dell comment to AT about this?I'm actually interested in 500GB 7200.10's and hoping this release will push the price of those down a lot.
Gary Key - Monday, March 19, 2007 - link
We do not have an exact date. Hitachi committed to having product into the retail channel by the end of Q1. We should have an answer from Dell tomorrow on when they will offer it outside of their systems. Hitachi is saying the drive will launch at $399, just waiting to see $550 price tags when the first drives show up... ;)Jeff7181 - Monday, March 19, 2007 - link
This might find it's way into my computer later this year. :)BUL - Monday, March 19, 2007 - link
Interesting that perpendicular technology was chosen given the R&D costs (with the tiny return of ~5 years before obsolescence--the article mentions that perpendicular can ONLY go 5x denser with existing techology & figure we'll see 5TB perpendicular drives in 2 years), etc... So why don't manufacturers offer 5 1/4" drives? Not to invoke memories of the MFM drives of long-ago (the original XT had a double-size 5 1/4" MFM drive of 10MB), but they have potentially 50-60% more surface area per platter, and with a possibility of 7(?) platters, isn't that a better solution? True, you wouldn't put them in SFFs or notebooks, but how many of us have towers with empty 5 1/4" bays??? And I assume that a 1TB 5 1/4" drive would be more energy-efficient than two 500GB 3 1/2" drives...Also, has anyone REALLY tested to see if perpendicular is truly a reliable technology? Seems like manufacturers have 50 years of experience with parallel storage, and only 1-2 years using perpendicular storage...
Spoelie - Tuesday, March 20, 2007 - link
Bulkier, slower, less energy efficient and more moving parts that reduce reliability all in the name of increased capacity is not the way to the future. I think the biggest problem at the moment is NOT storage capacity, they're mostly increasing capacity to keep HDs evolving and not drop in price, as it's one of the only competitive advantages. If you can increase capacity with the same material cost and some extra R&D, it would be stupid not to do it, and a better way than increasing the material cost.In fact, regular folk have way too much capacity at the moment. A Seagate CEO worded it nicely a while back "Face it, we're not changing the world. All we do is enable people to store more crap/porn."
The future lies in the direction of flash based hard drives: smaller, less/no moving parts instead of more, faster access times, lower energy consumption/heat. Or other alternative technologies that offer the same advantages. The densities and cost are the only reasons we're not all buying them at the moment, something that should be fixed over time.
If you're worried about unused case slots, buy one of those things that enable you to install normal hard drives in it, or convince the case designers to include more 3 1/2" slots and less 5 1/4" slots.
misuspita - Monday, March 19, 2007 - link
Have you ever seen a slow motion filming of a cd-rom disk wobbling? Same thing here! I think the platters got smaller because the vibrations produced by them grew with the speed. Since today's r/w heads need to be extremely close to the surface, that would be utterly impossible to control at that speed and diameter. They changed also from an aluminum based disk to an glass based one also, because the roughness of the surface on the Al platter.tygrus - Monday, March 19, 2007 - link
It's harder to spin a large diametter platter at high speed. More weight, more wobble, slower access times. I saw once a 5.25" 4x2.5" SATA drive array. Quantum used to do a large format BigFoot for cheap, slow large capacity but it wasn't continued. We have plenty of capacity per platter but limited perf/GB (worse every year) so why decrease performance to increase capacity ?piroroadkill - Monday, March 19, 2007 - link
All of the Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 drives have been perpendicular for some time..It seems like a perfectly reliable tech to me
Olaf van der Spek - Monday, March 19, 2007 - link
How smart is it to use temperatures from SMART?Did you verify all HDDs use good quality unbiased temperature sensors?
> Our thermal tests utilize sensor readings via the S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) capability of the drives and are reported by utilizing the Active SMART 2.42 utility.