Introduction

You can never have too much money or too much storage. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a little bit of a pack rat. I don’t like throwing things away. So I still have on my hard drive, my personal statements that got me into college. With file sizes getting bigger and bigger and with higher resolution audio, video, and images, you will need a bigger hard drive sooner rather than later. Actually the only files that I have seen get smaller with time are the new Microsoft Word and Excel files in Office 2007, which are XML-based.

Today we’re taking a quick look at one of the biggest hard drives you can find on the market, the Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 1 Terabyte drive. The spec sheets are pretty impressive:

Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000
Interface	Serial ATA 3.0Gb/sec
Capacity	1GB
Sector Size	512 bytes
Disks/heads	5/10
# of Platters	5
Perpendicular Recording?	Yes
Data Buffer Size	32MB
Rotational Speed	7200 RPM
Latency	4.17ms (avg)
Seek Time	8.5ms read (typical), 9.2ms write (typical)
Warranty	3-years

The Deskstar 7K1000 is rated for 50,000 start and stop cycles, which is the same as drives rated for 1.2 MTBF, but they do not advertise a specific MTBF for this drive. This is on par with Western Digital’s RE2, RAID optimized, drives.

Hitachi claims that their five platter design used on the Deskstar 7K1000 improves reliability since it doesn’t push the bit densities. In contrast, Western Digital claims their four platter design improves reliability since it has fewer parts. Samsung says that they are even more reliable with three platters on their 1TB drive.


We tested the Hitachi drives in a Windows Vista x64 software striped RAID configuration using both HD Tach and SiSoft Sandra benchmarks. These tests were done on our 8-core Intel V8 reference system, using SAS/SATA onboard controllers.