Benchmarks

We compared the 1TB Hitachi drive head-to-head with our Seagate 0.75 TB ST3750640AS-RK drives. Both are on the cutting edge of magnetic recording media, with perpendicular recording and SATA II. We did not have Seagate’s latest 1 TB 7200.11 drive for comparison, the Seagate 7200.11 came out about 6 months after the Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000, but does boast a 5-year warranty and a four platter design.

Performance results

As you can see, you get an incredible increase in disk performance using a striped RAID array. In comparing the numbers to the stock SiSoft references, the striped RAID setup is as fast as the 10,000 rpm drives in transfer rate, they will still trail on access time though.

In short, you don’t give up any performance by moving to a larger capacity drive, even with 5 platters. This makes sense as the density of both drives is very similar. In terms of acoustics, I found the Hitachi drives to be very unobtrusive.

Conclusions

It is just a matter of time before you will need a 1TB hard drive. A few years ago, we wrote a huge article about our 1 TB storage server with four 250GB drives. Back then, 1 TB was a lot of storage. Today, when building your next mini-pc or HTPC, you can put 1TB of storage in the same form factor. With eSATA slowly gaining popularity, the days of needing dedicated storage servers may be passing, at least for the home or home office.

The Hitachi 1TB drives come very highly recommended. In terms of value, you are paying much less per gigabyte than you ever did, although the sweet spot in terms of dollar per gig is with the 500GB designs right now. There is a cost to being cutting edge, although here, it is minimal. With performance we must not also forget reliability, and with a 3yr warranty, the Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 has not made any compromises. If you need more insurance though, they offer an Ultrastar A7K1000 with a 5yr warranty. One problem though, now we have to figure out a good backup solution…