Alas, poor Hitachi; we knew him well, Horatio. Hitachi’s Global Storage division might have been gobbled up by Western Digital, but it’s still putting out product, at least for now. Hitachi’s latest addition to the Deskstar line is a five-platter, 3TB, 7,200rpm drive with 64MB of cache and a 6Gb/s SATA interface. Yeah, we can deal with that.
Hitachi's Deskstar slightly edges out Seagate's Barracuda—but how long will the Hitachi hard drive brand last?
Hitachi’s Deskstar ships with a piece of paper directing users to download the Hitachi GPT Disk Manager from Paragon Software. The boot solution for legacy users seems to be to just divide the disk into separate partitions. We expect Maximum PC readers can manage the same with Windows’ built-in tools—although we’re not sure how many Maximum PC readers want to boot from a 3TB partition in their desktop rigs.
On our Sandy Bridge test bed, which has UEFI, we had no problem creating a 3TB bootable partition and installing 64-bit Windows 7; we didn’t even need to load F6 drivers. We ran our standard mechanical-drive benchmarks on the Deskstar and found average sustained read speeds of around 119.5MB/s and write speeds around 118.5MB/s. In both our Premiere Pro encoding test, which writes a 20GB uncompressed AVI to the disk, and the PCMark Vantage HDD subtest, the Deskstar performed faster than the Barracuda XT, despite having largely the same specs and despite the Barracuda’s faster average read and write speeds. The Deskstar’s random-access speeds were fully 2ms faster than the Barracuda’s.
With an MSRP of $250 and faster real-world scores than the Seagate Barracuda XT, the Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000 is a real winner.
$250, www.hitachigst.com
Fast, capacious, and relatively inexpensive; helpful software wizard.
Sequential reads and writes lag very slightly behind Seagate’s offering.
| Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000 (3TB) | Seagate Barracuda XT (3TB) | WD Caviar Green (3TB) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| HDTUNE 4.01 | |||
| Avg Read (MB/s) | 119.5 | 124* | 101.5 |
| Random-Access Read (ms) | 15.7* | 17.2 | 15.7* |
| Avg Write (MB/s) | 118.5 | 122* | 96.9 |
| Random-Access Write (ms) | 15.7 | 17.3 | 15.6* |
| Burst Write (MB/s) | 315.6* | 284.8 | 183.1 |
| Premiere Pro Encode (sec) | 435* | 447 | 530 |
| PCMark Vantage | 7,663* | 6,975 | 4,910 |
Asterisk (*) denotes best score. All drives tested on our hard drive test bench: a stock-clocked Intel Core i3-2100 CPU on an Asus P8P67 Pro (Rev 3.1) motherboard with 4GB DDR3, running Windows 7 Professional 64-bit. All tests performed using native Intel 6Gb/s SATA chipset with IRST version 10.1 drivers.
caterin
January 05, 2012 at 12:57am
I have looked for information of this caliber for the last several hours. Your site is greatly appreciated.Phlebotomy Training
JohnP
July 13, 2011 at 8:43pm
Not sure what drive is being reviewed as I could find a Hitachi Deskstar 3TB 7200 64MB drive on Amazon for $179. It is the OS03086 drive...
Still cannot beat the Samsung 2TB 5400 drives for $70 though...
BAMT
July 12, 2011 at 1:47pm
Wow, I missed Hitachi's being sold to WD. That stinks, because Hitachi disks are the only consumer drives I've never had fall out of a RAID array. WD consumer disks, on the other hand, are the only kind I've had over 50% drop out of a RAID array.
d3v
July 13, 2011 at 3:02am
RAID compatible drives are different from the standard WD lineup. You probably bought the cheaper desktop drives. There is a utility that WD posts on its site that lets you adjust these drives for use in a RAID array. Search for it. Its called the WDTLER.
bautrey
July 12, 2011 at 1:23pm
U knows the 5400 RPM, 32MB cache of the 3TB Hitachi HDD is only $140 as of now. I think thats a hell of a better deal. I would like to see some benchmarks on those.
Print
