Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000

Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 Available Capacities Model Number Capacity HDS721075KLA330 750 GB HDS721010KLA330 1000 GB Lowest Real-Time Price (1000 GB): Introduction Deskstar drives have a long history of leading the pack when it comes to sheer capacity. In StorageReview's infancy, IBM produced a pair of marvels to behold, the 5-platter Deskstar 14GXP and 16GP. The following year, 1999, saw the Deskstars 22GXP and 25GP as the talk of the field. The year after that, the famous (or infamous?) 75GXP hit the scene. For a while afterwards, the Deskstar line retreated from its unique five-platter assemblies to a more conservative three-platter design. Thus, the Deskstars 60GXP, 120GXP, 180GXP and (for the first time under the Hitachi rather than the IBM name) 7K250 all featured three-disc flagships. During this era, Western Digital's Caviars and Raptors gave IBM/Hitachi's traditionally performance-leading Deskstars a run for the money. The Deskstar's 5-platter design returned in the guise of the 7K400, a drive that once again carved out the family's place at the bleeding edge of ultra-capacious drives. Today, it is paying off for the conglomerate... Hitachi scored a huge marketing and image coup through being the first manufacturer to bring a terabyte drive to the market.

Through perpendicular magnetic recording techniques, Hitachi crams 200 gigabytes of data across each of the 7200 RPM Deskstar 7K1000's five platters to achieve the drive's heralded capacity. Also unique in the 7K1000 is an impressive 32-megabyte buffer, one at least double the size found in virtually every other drive. An 8.5 millisecond seek time rounds out the vitals.

Hitachi boasts of an array of low-power modes that reduce the drive's power draw when idle, in turn translating into a cooler running and thus longer-lasting disc. In addition, a traditionally notebook-oriented ramp load/unload design that parks heads well away from platters increases shock resistance and reliability, The firm backs the drive with a three-year warranty.

The following charts compare the Deskstar 7K1000 with the drives outlined below. Over the past few months we have received some questions about reviews of drives such as Seagate's 750 GB Barracuda 7200.10 and WD's 500 GB Caviar SE16. Note that such drives are mechanically identical to units that the firms orient towards the enterprise, differing only in qualification trials, warranty, and error-recovery procedures. Our looks at enterprise-oriented SATA drives from Seagate, Maxtor, and WD in two articles (the 500 GB enterprise drive roundup and the stand-alone Barracuda ES review) in effect represent the performance one may expect from their consumer counterparts. As a result, they also make great drives against which the 7K1000, a drive aimed at both the enterprise and demanding consumer, may be contrasted. We also throw WD's 150-gigabyte Raptor, a perennial favorite among the performance-obsessed crowd, into the comparison: