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Hitachi Deskstar T7K500

Posted 05/07/07 at 04:11:26 PM  by David Murphy

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We’ll get the bad news out of the way first. Hitachi’s Deskstar T7K500 hard drive, with an easy-to-remember 500GB of storage, is unremarkable. More than that, it underperforms when compared to similarly featured, similarly priced (if not cheaper!) products.

Although the Deskstar’s speedy random access time of 13.2ms is faster than times posted by all of the similarly outfitted 500GB models we’ve looked at, that’s all this drive has going for it. The Deskstar’s average read time, which is a pretty good reflection of a drive’s performance across the entirety of the disc, taps out at an average of 64.2MB/s.

When compared against the sea of drives that sit in our Lab, the Deskstar’s average read speed is barely better than the Seagate 400GB Barracuda 7200.8’s—a PATA drive, mind you. And SATA models from both Samsung and Western Digital (which have feature sets that are nearly identical to the Deskstar’s) utterly destroy the Hitachi in our benchmarks, as both push read speeds upward of 70MB/s.

These results were slightly curious to us, as the Deskstar sports three platters of approximately 166GB apiece. That gives it quite a boost in areal density when compared to the Western Digital Caviar’s measly four-platter 125GB setup. As we’ve seen in the past, drives with juicer areal densities tend to run faster. But not in the Deskstar’s case!

So, what then is the good news? If Hitachi’s new terabyte drive helps lower the price of the company’s smaller models, the cost-to-benefit ratio of the T7K500 could, in the future, make it a nice solution. That’s about the only silver lining we see.

Click to Enlarge

The drive’s features—a 16MB buffer, a SATA 3G interface, and NCQ—do little to push it past the competition.

Hitachi Deskstar T7K500
www.hitachi.com
plus
DEATH STAR

Easy to install into a computer. Uh. Nicely constructed. Pretty exterior.

minus
DARKSABER

Slow performance when compared to other 500GB models. Feh.

verdict:7
BENCHMARKS
  HITACHI DESKSTAR T7K500 WESTERN DIGITAL CAVIAR SE16
AVERAGE READ SPEED 64.2 MB/s 72.6 MB/s
BURST SPEED 127.2 MB/s 204.9 MB/s
RANDOM ACCESS SPEED 13.2 ms 13.5 ms
Best scores are bolded.
COMMENTS:2
TAGS: maximum pc, david, storage, Review, Hard Drive, hitachi, hardware, deskstar, T7K500, internal, build a pc
COMMENTS
avatar_slightly_ curious?

Submitted by mrnathan on Tue, 05/08/2007 - 7:57am

Author: "These results were slightly curious to us..."

Yeah, they're pretty "CURIOUS" to me too.
I don't know how MaxPC got the results they did, but StorageReview.com's results sure tell a different story about this drive.
If you want an education about benchmarking hard drives, start here: http://www.storagereview.com/articles/200111/20011109Renaissance_4.html
SR's testing methodolgy is probably the most fastidious and well-designed anywhere, and they are widely regarded as the most authoritative hdd review site on the Internet.
Google 'hard drive review' and see what comes up first...
According to SR's "High-End DriveMark 2006" the T7K500 is the _BEST_ performing 7.2k rpm drive tested.
NUMBER ONE!
First place: Hitachi T7K500
Second place: Hitachi 7K500
Tied for third place: WD4000YR and WD4000KD
The first Samsung shows up in ninth.
(I'm excluding 10k and 15k rpm drives here, and duplications due to testing drives w/ and w/o NCQ.)
In "Office DriveMark 2006" the Hitachi T7K500 is beaten only by Hitachi's own 7K500, and by a margin of less than 1 percent.
The IO/S score turned out by the T7K500 in "High-End DriveMark 2006" beats the WD's by 9.5 percent, and the highest scoring Samsung by 24.5 percent!
I'm don't mean to bash MaxPC in general, (I get their mag in the mail every month) but this article just plain sucks.
Not just the erroneous benchmarks, but also the tone of the article sounds like the author has an agenda. For example, the author states the drive is 'unremarkable, and more than that, it's an under-performer.' As if he's just enumerated TWO problems and not one. Since when are hard drives "remarkable" aside from their performance?
Another example: saying that the WD and Samsung "utterly destroy the Hitachi" by turning out benchmark results that are 9 percent better (results that are almost undoubtedly flawed). I'd reserve the phrase "utterly destroyed" for the Samsung getting beaten in a legit benchmark by 24.5 percent.
Maybe MaxPC should get their hands on another sample and run their tests again.
But maybe first they should go read SR's pages on hdd benchmarking so they can report something more useful than the 'utterly meaningless' sequential read figures that were probably used in this lame article.
Cheers.

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avatarJust an observation... the

Submitted by chaosdsm on Mon, 05/07/2007 - 3:04pm

Just an observation... the Burst Speed listed for the Hitachi is quite slow for a SATAII drive, is it possible that the drive is factory set to SATA1 mode even though it may be capable of faster opperation??? I know my very first SATA2 drive was pre-set at the factory for SATA1 opperation due to potential for trouble if ran in SATA2 mode on a SATA1 motherboard. Thus they required you to download a utility to manually set the drive to SATA2 mode.

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