Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000: Terabyte Storage arrives on the Desktop

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.