Hitachi 7K500 Deskstar

This hard drive is some kind of monster

Hitachi pulled out all the stops for its latest flagship disk drive, the 7K500. Not only does it sport 100GB more space than its nearest rival—the Seagate 7200.8—it includes a 16MB buffer, support for some SATA II extensions, and is the first SATA 3G drive on the market.

Though Seagate’s 400GB 7200.8 drive packs 133GB onto a single platter, Hitachi is holding steady at 100GB per platter these days. The 7K500’s five-platter design is unheard of these days, but it allows Hitachi to hit record-breaking capacities. The SATA II features that the drive sports include hot-swappability (when paired with the appropriate mobo); staggered spin-up, to reduce the power draw when booting multi-drive systems; native command queuing; and a 300MB/s SATA interface that’s twice as fast as older SATA drives. On paper this drive looks like the new 7,200rpm king, but the real questions is, how does it stack up in our Lab tests?

During testing, the 7K500 rocked like a hurricane. Its score of 29.3 in our application index—a script of six real-world applications—trounced the mighty Raptor’s score of 26.4 and the Maxtor’s DiamondMax 10’s grade of 26.6. Impressive stuff, for sure, especially considering that the 7K500 has the same buffer size and areal density as the Maxtor drive. Of course, it sports two additional read/write heads to accommodate its five-platter design (Maxtor’s drive uses three platters). The rest of the 7K500’s scores were exactly in line with what we’d expect from a drive with a 7,200rpm spindle speed and 100GB platters. It was a tad slower in overall read speeds than Seagate’s 133GB-per-platter 7200.8 drive, but its average read speed of approximately 50MB/s is nothing to sneeze at.

One extremely cool and unique feature of the 7K500 is the included configuration utility—the Hitachi Feature Tool. Other manufacturers have shipped drive-tweaking utilities in the past, but then quietly dropped support for them to reduce tech support calls. The Feature Tool is a bootable diskette that lets you tweak key drive settings to generate less noise, transfer data faster, or strike a compromise between the two. When we adjusted the acoustic-level slider from “maximum performance” to “low noise,” for instance, seek times dipped from 13ms to 17ms, but the drive also became a tad quieter. You can also switch between maximum and minimum power-consumption modes, adjust the interface to run at 150MB/s or 300MB/s, and tweak a host of largely inconsequential settings. We’re not aware of a similar utility currently shipping with any of the other “big four” drive manufacturers and we appreciate Hitachi including this utility in the box.

As fond as we are of Maxtor’s 300GB DiamondMax 10, its reign as our favorite 7,200rpm drive has come to a close. This new Hitachi drive spanks the Maxy in our real-world benchmark, and is 200GB larger to boot. The WD Raptor is also extinct, as far as we’re concerned, given its comparatively puny capacity and middling performance. Hitachi definitely brought its A-game to the Lab this time, and it’ll be interesting to see how WD, Maxtor, and Seagate respond.
—Josh Norem

+ GIGIBITS Humungous capacity, quiet and very fast, Feature Tool is neat.

- GIBLETS We’ll have to get back to you on this one.

Month Reviewed: July 2005
Verdict: 9
kickass=yes
URL: www.hgst.com