I just got one last month. But yesterday I found it's onsale here
http://www.pricebat.ca/Hitachi-Deskstar-7K1000-750GB-SATA2-7200RPM-...
...ooops

"SI units are built on the same base 10 decimal system we've been using since grade school. Computers, however, use a binary base 2 system."

Actually....

MEMORY is usually measured in base 2 but DISK is usually measured in base 10, probably for marketing reasons and to avoid more absurd lawsuits.

An IEC International Standard around for about a decade now brings some clarity to this... use metric prefixes correctly as standardized by SI for base 10 and use the IEC standard for base 2, "gibibyte" (GiB) in this case.

See http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html or Wikipedia.

Of course, you could always start using base 2 for kilometers, kilograms, etc. if you want to be consistent with this historical inaccuracy ;-)

I thought this was a pretty good review in that it covered the highlights of interest to most people. Of course, the main attraction to this drive is the storage capacity, and the people who buy it will buy it for that and be satisfied with everything else as it lays.

One thing I'd like to see in TR review bar charts from now on is some imagination in the color of the bar representing the product under review. It's fine to alternate the compared products in shades of yellow, but how about picking a much different color for the bar representing the review product--you know, like green--or red--or blue, so that at a glance the position of the reviewed product in the chart stands out like a sore thumb...? This would make the bar charts much more enjoyable to study, imo.

As well, I did catch the opening snipe at RAID configurations--RAID in general seems to be somewhat of a common editorial voodoo doll that people cannot resist sticking a pin or two in whenever the subject is hard drives--for some reason that I have never been able to divine...;) The inference here, of course, is that if a drive fails in RAID then the only thing Hitachi replaces is the drive and you lose the data. I think it would have been nice for TR just to also mention that if a single drive fails running in IDE that the same exact scenario applies...;) (Hopefully, TR did not mean to imply that if you're a good boy and eschew RAID then Hitachi will reward you by replacing not only your drive, but also your data, in the event you should lose your single drive...;))

I think the real question here is where is the overclocking results page?

Hi, How do you test system boot times? Do you restart the system two times before you test? Do you test a hard drive three or more times and calculate the average time? I guess something in this benchmark goes wrong...can't believe those results...

You know, I can't help but wonder why they still only slap 8, 16, and now 32mb of memory on HDs. That was top of the line ages ago.

If they concentrated on better prefetching to, lets say, fill up a 512mb module all the time you would really have something to go off of. I guess that would be a lot like a hybrid HD, only it wouldn't be as it wouldn't use flash memory which IMO would be better.

Then there is the whole aspect of SI vs none SI ways of measuring bits and bytes. I'm just waiting for a company to come out with a "true" 1TB model or whatever. Not so disimilar to how PSU makers are and were touting "true power" vs "peak power".

I'm sure a good graphic like was shown with this review on the box will make people realize what they mean.

I dunno, but these just seem rather no brainers to me for improving a HD.

Re: Super capacitor for power storage to keep drive working at shutdown.
1F 12V Super capacitor is the size of a fly spray can and is able to supply 1A for 1s or about 1s of HD use if you're lucky (voltage drops, resistance etc means you can't use all of it's capacity).

How small can you make a battery for 12v@1A ? like having 2 PocketPC PDA batteries or 4xphone batteries). About 1/3 size of 3.5" drive. A bit bulky.

Could they use the spindown of the disk platters to supply enough power to copy data from cache to FLASH ? problem being limited <8MB/s write (small/narrow FLASH is slow, larger drives use wider controller and larger cips for more MB/s).

AAM (Automatic Acoustic Management) would be slower. Some drive models don't allow you to fiddle with the AAM setting.

Noticed mixed results with the drives. Usage pattern and drive optimisation (priorities of designers/algorithms) greatly effect some results.

PC CPU/system benchmarks at start don't stress the HD so don't need all to be in every review (comment on skipped).

Would like to see more RAID controllers with more RAM (& battery backup). FLASH is not good for lots of random small writes.

It appears that you forgot to turn the AAM (Automatic Acoustic Management) on for any of the noise tests in this article resulting in much worse scores than other reviews already floating around the web.

If you in fact did use AAM and still ended up with these results could you make a note of that in the article and if not could you add AAM results to your findings? I think it's a bit misleading not to at least try it for the sake of the article, especially since Anand, etc. have found that it results in such a dramatic noise reduction.

Heh. I monitor clients' servers. We got an event last night alerting that a disk drive's free space was below 5% (the standard critical threshold), around 4%. I called their on-call tech and he said no big deal, it's a 10 terabyte drive array. Even 1% free space is still a hundred gigabytes.

What's with the triple-layer steel plating on the underside of the drive?

What does that thing weigh? Could we build a moderately strong bunker wall out of them?

Drive makers ought to focus on really fine-tuning single-platter drives for noise and power without losing performance. I know they're GOOD, better than the old days, but still. I want a new-model SE16 single platter, with perpendicular recording. I don't even consider drives without that at this point, for my primary drive.

Highest density platters? Seagate's got single platter 250GB drives. ST3250310AS and ST3250410AS for instance. According to the spec sheets anyway. Seagate says 164Gb per square inch, Hitachi says 149 for the 7K1000.

Where the hell is the Samsung F1, 333gb per platter, 3 platters - it sounds like it could be a monster.

Imagine a 5 platter version of that or rather, imagine a nice, cheap dual platter 666 / 650gb version - that would be hot.

Alas, no news.

Hitachi's 1TB doesn't sound too impressive but in 24 months it'll be 139$ AR on newegg, good times.

I myself just ordered 3x750gb WD's for 570$ US total, not bad - I know 500's are better priced right now but 500 is just so small, 2.25TB in my box over 3 HDD's is better (to me) than 2.5TB over 5 HD's

I believe there to be a Typo on page 11

Turning our attention to IOMeter response times, we see a similar patter emerge.

Just thought i would toss that out there.

Where on earth are the real tests? Where are the random seek tests? The small file burst tests? The large file tests? The data transfer continuity tests? Worst test of a hard drive I've ever read.

Here's a snippet from /. that says everything about the tech value presented in this article:

"OS loading times"? "Game loading times"? Wow. What incompentet, irrelevant, generalizing, illogical, no-knowledge nonsense. They should never put a humanitarian to do the job of a technician. If the same guy were to do a review of furnite he'd compare comfort of a sofa in terms of what color cloth was used, or the brand of after-shave used by the salesperson flogging the furniture."

Overall, it's a good review. Very thorough I think.

I would like to mention that sometimes, absolute performance isn't the best.

Hitachi drives have never been stellar for performance. They're usually in the middle of the pack, ever since IBM sold off it's storage division, and Hitachi Global Storage Technologies was formed from the purchase, to which they solved the ailing "Deathstar" problem by dumping the consumer product line technologies in favor of implementing the Enterprise market technologies. And it has worked well for them.

I, myself, own a total of at least 50 IBM/Hitachi drives. At least 20 or so of them are Hitachi 500 GB. In the last 4 years, of the 50 (total), only 6 have died. Two due to thermal, sitting behind the heating vent in the middle of winter, the rest from actual usage (progressive erosion).

What is hard for you to measure is reliability in the field. And that is something that Hitachi drives have ALWAYS excelled in, to the point that large OEMs have started using Hitachi drives exclusively for their storage solutions. (e.g. Sun Fire X4500 features 48 Hitachi 500 GB hard drives).

You don't find that with any other "consumer" level drive being used in the Enterprise market as mass storage medium.

That is a true testament of the Enterprise heritage in Hitachi hard drives.

Excellent review. It's probably not worth buying the drive unless you need tons of space and have only a few bays to put them in. Otherwise, smaller drives would be a better buy. WD is fastest, Seagate is quietest. Hitachi is just freakin' big!

Some corrections:

On page 14, second to last paragraph: "...to the back of the back." Second 'back' should be 'pack'.

In the conclusion, "...but a $0.10/gigabyte is quite a gap to broach..." In this sentence, the word "difference" or "disparity" should come after "$0.10/gigabyte", and the word 'broach' is misused. At least, your usage doesn't match any meaning I know or can look up.

Holy cow, look at all of the diggs! Up to 646 as of this writing... Has TR ever gotten than many before? Putting the Digg link on the front page: good choice. ;-)

A late and not great review. I also wasn't impressed to see the NCIX retail sticker still on the drive -- that looks unprofessional because most professionals don't buy their own hardware from a store to review!

Also, the author skipped over the real issue when he talked about the size. Windows displays size in GiB, but it SAYS it is in "GB". Windows is simply wrong and causes confusion. The gibibyte vs gigabyte explanation is what he should have discussed.

The only thing I was looking at in those graphs were the WD 750GB results.

It does look like they've hit the point of diminishing returns on cache size.

You know, I have to say that 1 TB is really big. I'm still happy in the 150-200 GB realm. And I'm not particularly low on the multimedia factor here. I don't tend to keep stuff on the HDD tho, I burn stuff to DVD because I don't really trust HDDs. Just imagine though if one of these 1 TB monsters puked out and you lost all that data! OMG! :)

And my HDDphobia exists even though I've never had one totally go out on me. A few have become unstable though, with read errors popping up on big transfers. WD's website-based quick RMA ship'n'swap is really great for times like that. One doesn't even need to give them a call; just fill in your serial number and address and here comes a refurb!

What I really would rather have is a solid state beast without any access time. I am happy enough with a couple hundred gigs of storage. The speed of HDDs is just so disappointing. We have these 3.0 Gb/s interfaces but drives that can barely maintain 60 MB/s (and that's only when seeking is very minimal).

Seems like a step in the right direction(increased capacity) but I don't see this product as being worthwhile. I'd much rather buy 2 500GB drives and perhaps have one being the boot drive and one for additional storage/other applications. Same capacity, less price, potentially better performance.

wow, it was like drawing a line down a page. only i/o and file copy tests showed better variations.

Great review.

All I get out of it is the WD drive rocks.

It seems that WD 750GB is the fastest 7200RPM hard drive, and it is only $199 on newegg

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136131

I wish this compared the drives I buy, even for reference: Cheetah u320's and Cheetah SAS drives.

Then I would know how this drives stands up to the ones I am currently using, instead of standing up against drives that I passed over for the Cheetahs.

I really want to know.

Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.4GHz??? This hard drive was tested on a P4? I mean, I know the CPU isn't really a major factor in hard drive tests, but isn't the P4 a bit old to be used for benchmarking?

Excellent HDD review as always Geoff.

I have to say that I am not that all impressed by any of the current batch of mainstream HDDs. They are about as fast as each other with some marginal differences here and there. The only there factors that I consider these days are warranty, price and capacity.

The increasing on-board cache trick was always a band-aid to overcome some of the physical limitations in HDD performance. The 32MBs on 7K1000 only proved useful in IOpeak suite where it could fit 32-64 outstanding IO request onto its cache unlike its competitors.

The reason why 7K1000 fall short in other areas is that 200GB platter technology isn't mature and additional latency from having to drive 5 platters. I suspect firmware updates could bridge the gap.

Nicely put there Damage,did someone diss that guy when he joined up or perhaps his G/F ran off with a TR regular?
Nice review as always and extra points for the cool,controlled response to the unjustified whine.
ps..that was a good one ssidbroadcast LOL

Good luck with these, folks.

You are a bad man! ;)

Great review as ever.

Bets on how long until someone compalins that you lose 7% of the space in formatting.