Hitachi's 500GB SATA-II Reviewed

Doggie Fizzle writes "The specifications for the Hitachi Desktstar 7K500 are impressive. 500 GB of disk space, 16 MB of cache memory, and 3.0 Gbps of transfer speeds are about as good as you are going to get in today's hard drives. The only category that might be rivaled is transfer speed, but that would require RAID or an Ultra320 SCSI drive to do so. This BigBruin review matches it up with some Seagate drives to show off its performance."

Comments

Hitach's?

[Anonymous Coward]

How can you trust a 500GB drive from this dubious "Hitach" newcomer who is obviously just typosquatting Hitachi's reputation?

It's not SATA II

[QX-Mat]

They dont like you calling it that. There's not SATA 2 standard as yet.

It's instead, SATA 3Gb/s. Most motherboard manufacturers jumped the gun however and invented their version.

Matt

Re:3 gbps? 3 gbps? Is that 375 MB/s? IDE/SATA does

[vidarlo]

3 gbps? Is that 375 MB/s? IDE/SATA doesn't support that! What's the point?

SATA-II indeed supports that. So does the disk. From cache.. No way it reaches more than 50MiB/sec from the platters, which is what counts. So I think it should be dead easy to rival speed with raid. My 6 year old IBM 18.2GB UltraStar drives read 25MiB/sec, so 3 of them would outperform in read/write. But would not take that much data...

So, indeed, it is a large disk, but it is not extraordinarily fast. Of course, bigger disks means more data per second, since the platter size is the same. Then data has to be packed more densily, and more data passes under head per second. So the disk can read more, in a sequential read.

Re:Hitatchi Deathstar

[vidarlo]

Deathstar disks was a problematic series. It was the DeskStar 75GXP, the 75GB disks from IBM. They was using 5 platters, instead of the normal 4, in the same height. This meant denser packed plates, which ment less space for heads. This crashed. But other disks from IBM was entirely fine.

Here is a page with more info on the DeathStars. And Yes, I've been using many IBM/Hitachi disks, and never had problems with the 4-platter versions. It was just that 5 platters was kinda exprimental...

There's a difference.

[game kid]

Hitachi makes Deskstars. Hitach, as one can clearly read above, makes Desktstars.

Recent Hitachi experience...

[SubDude]

Recent Hitachi return policy prevents me from even considering this line of HDs.

I attempted to return a failed IBM Deskstar last year only to be told I would have to return it to the US, not the Canadian centre I had used in the past.

I explained repeatedly that I had always returned HDs of all makes to Canadian centres and that it was prohibitively expensive to ship a DEAD HD to the US.

Hitachi didn't care. I have never bought a Hitachi drive since and never will.

I have been using Seagate HDs because of their 5 year warranty and have not had a single failure to date. Seagate = cool, quiet and reliable.

Goodbye IBM/Hitachi, Hello Seagate.

Brian

Re:500GB finally?

[doormat]

Demand and the end of an underlying technology (GMR heads and parallel recording).

Not many consumers need 500GB of HD space in their computer for email and AOL. But 500GB would sure be useful in a Hi-Def PVR. But PVRs are still such a small segment compared to PCs.

Plus, tech wise, we're basically at the top of the S-Curve for the current HD technology. So we need to get the new technology and start the S-Curve all over again. We had a lot of advances when we went from 10GB HDs to 40 and 60GB HDs (one new larger capacity annoucement every quarter almost), but we've started to slow down and stagnate. I'm hoping things get going again soon and we make big advances from 1TB, 1.5TB. 2TB drives.