Hitachi Deskstar 7K500

Several families and several years have passed since the fervor over those two families hit a fevered pitch. As time moved on, the hubbub over those lines has died down... but Hitachi's commitment to remain on the bleeding edge of capacity and speed has not. Last year's Deskstar 7K400 reintroduced the firm's unique five-disc assembly and delivered first-class performance that until very recently vied for the SATA performance crown. A parallel ATA unit retrofitted for serial operation, the 7K400 incorporated a surprisingly robust (yet relatively unadvertised) implementation of ATA-4 tagged command queuing.

The manufacturer's first attempt at a native SATA drive design was the transitional Deskstar T7K250. Though it featured from-the-ground-up SATA construction and implemented SATA Native Command Queuing, the drive took a step backwards from the 7K400 when it come to capacity. Now, however, the firm is back in full-force with a new flagship, the Deskstar 7K500.

Hitachi's latest leverages the five-platter design reintroduced in the 7K400 with higher-density 100-gigabyte platters and is the first half-terabyte drive to hit the market. Like all Deskstars, the 7K500 claims a relatively aggressive 8.5 millisecond average seek time. It is the first of Hitachi's drives to feature a larger 16-megabyte buffer similar to those found in competing designs. Like the T7K250, the 7K500 boasts a second-generation 300 MB/sec SATA interface and NCQ. A desktop-standard three-year warranty protects the drive.

With 7K500's monstrous capacity, Hitachi targets the hot-rod rigs put together by power users as well as entry-level servers with light duty cycles where capacity remains a more significant factor than blazing random accesses.

As a contemporary 7200 RPM drive, the Deskstar 7K500 will be compared against these drives in the tests that follow: