Testing Participants

Hitachi

Deskstar 7K1000, 1 TB: HDS721010KLA330

We will be introducing the participating devices in alphabetic order. Coincidentally, first goes the Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000, the first 1-terabyte drive to hit the market. This company had used a five-platter HDD design before and it is thanks to this design solution that Hitachi managed to be the first developer to create a hard disk drive with such a pretty-looking, round value of capacity (while the other developers were waiting for denser platters). We took a note of this HDD earlier, having compared it against its predecessors.

Hitachi offers an enterprise version called Ultrastar A7K1000 but it proved to be so similar to the 7K1000 in our previous test session that we have decided not to include it into this review.

Deskstar 7K1000.B, 1 TB: HDT721010SLA360

But when the competing brands quickly introduced 4- and even 3-platter drives of 1-terabyte capacity, the five-platter 7K1000 was far from looking good in comparison. It just had lower recording density and worse power consumption parameters. So, Hitachi needed to find higher-density platters and replace the electronics. The company did the job and introduced the Deskstar 7K1000.B series which had a recording density of 333 gigabytes per platter. Unfortunately, that series took quite a long time to reach shop shelves. Interestingly, Hitachi’s HDDs lost some buffer memory on the transition to the denser platters: the 7K1000 had 32 megabytes while the senior models of the 7K1000.B series are equipped with 16 megabytes and junior models, with 8 megabytes only. As for the frequency of unrecoverable read errors, it is 1 to 10¹⁴ operations again. Hitachi seems to have returned from enterprise to desktop HDD design in this series.

Deskstar E7K1000, 1 TB: HDE721010SLA330

Still, the company lacked a flagship model. Therefore they introduced the E7K1000 series. Equipped with the same platters and, as the photos show clearly enough, with the same electronics as the drives of the 7K1000.B series, the E7K1000 series models are endowed with 32 megabytes of cache. Frankly speaking, this HDD looks more like an enterprise model and the word Deskstar in its name looks like a typo (Hitachi’s enterprise models are referred to as Ultrastar). Anyway, we can benchmark it whatever it is called.

By the way, chips are always in open view in Hitachi drives, and we can see a new chip and new memory in both new series (7K1000.B and E7K1000).

The 7K1000 had a different selection of chips:

Well, there is nothing extraordinary, actually. The change of logo on the chip is due to the fact that Infineon sold its HDD chip manufacture to LSI in March 2008. So, the logo is different but the chip marking is the same. According to it, Hitachi’s new HDD series have a revised controller that is expected to deliver higher performance.

The memory is different, too. There are now 400MHz chips from Samsung instead of Hynix’s 333MHz memory.

Let’s move on to the other firms, though.