And here I thought the best thing about Friday was going to be the planned Burritos 'n Biscuits run to our local Taco Bell/KFC hybrid. No, Hitachi's new terabyte hard drive takes the cake (or the empanada) for today. Quite literally the second the box hit my desk, I was already there with the scissors, ready to rush this little guy into the labs for benchmarking.

Having survived the brief experience, the Deskstar 7K1000 emerged from our labs as a strong competitor -- speed-wise -- against all the other similarly configured drives we've tested. Pound-for-pound, the 7K1000 pulls in ever-so-slightly better a random access time than the next-closest hard drive in size, Seagate's 750GB Barracuda. Obviously, Western Digital's Raptor drive spanks the Deskstar like a... well... insert-your-favorite-spanking-related-metaphor-here. Still, that's almost comparing apples to oranges, considering the terabyte drive is over four times larger than the paltry 150GB Raptor. Against the 500GB drives we've tested, the Deskstar's random access speed is comparable to its lesser, 500GB model, and still faster than Samsung's SpinPoint T166 and Western Digital's trusty Caviar SE16.

Jumping over to average read speeds, the five-platter 7K1000 rocks out a blazingly speedy 72.7 MB/s. Minus Western Digital's Raptor drive, that's the fastest of the most recent drives we've tested. And yes, that again includes the 750GB Seagate. And it's quite faster than Hitachi's 500GB Deskstar, which clocked in a mere 64.2 MB/s during our labs tests.

All things considered -- including the price, $400! -- Hitchai's 7K1000 rocks. Absolutely rocks. It's speeds are certainly comparable, and in most cases better than, the current batch of similarly sized market leaders. And that's without even considering the big picture; you're getting a terabyte of storage. A terabyte. 1,000 gigabytes. And it's only $400? Seagate's 750GB Barracuda has an MSRP of $500. 'says it all, if you ask me!

Brief Stats!

Interface: SATA 3.0 Gb/s

Disks/heads: 5/10

Data buffer: 32MB

Rotational Speed: 7,200 RPM