Storage

In the last system building article, we saw the sheer brilliance of the Hitachi T7K250. It performed nearly as well as the faster 10K rpm Raptors, but offered a much better value. In this system build, we're going to use Hitachi 7K500 drives. Although these incorporate the same underlying technology of the T7K250, the 7K500 has additional platters and a 16MB buffer. For anyone wanting a terabyte in two drives, this is the best approach.

Good alternatives would have been the Western Digital Caviar RE2, however despite their nearline reliability claims there seem to be more reports of failure in comparison to the WD Raptor. The RE2 is clearly attractive for its price/performance ratio, but we'll still be conservative and recommend the Raptor line for mission-critical SATA drives. SCSI continue to set the standard for reliability and I would expect this trend to continue with Serial-Attached-SCSI drives. We have a T7K250 as a long-term reference and we'll be adding these 7K500 drives to our long-term reference test equipment as well.

Hitachi 7K500 #1
$400 – http://www.hgst.com

Hitachi 7K500 #2
$400 – http://www.hgst.com

SiSoft Sandra 2005