This is Hitachi's high-performance 7200 RPM 4 TB drive. It's also based on a five-platter design, but it includes 64 MB of cache, instead of 32.
Power consumption in performance-idle mode (which means the drive is still spinning) is rated at 6.9 W. That's 40% more than the Deskstar 5K4000. In exchange, however, rated transfer rates increase from 161 MB/s to 205 MB/s, representing at least a 24% increase. The effective net performance is 163 MB/s. Although this is a solid result, it cannot match Seagate's Barracuda at 194 MB/s.
The Seagate drive isn't designed for 24/7 availability though, and the 7K4000 is. In other words, this Hitachi disk is the fastest high-end hard drive for performance-oriented applications that require lots of throughput. As far as I/O performance is concerned, let's just say we'd recommend looking for SSDs instead of disk drives.
- Three And 4 TB Hard Drives For Your Digital Lifestyle
- 3 TB: Hitachi Deskstar 5K3000 (HDS5C3030ALA630)
- 3 TB: Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000 (HDS723030ALA640)
- 3 TB: Seagate Barracuda (ST3000DM001)
- 3 TB: Seagate Barracuda XT (ST3300651AS)
- 3 TB: Western Digital Caviar Green (WD30EZRX)
- 4 TB: Hitachi Deskstar 5K4000 (HDS5C4040ALE360)
- Hitachi Deskstar 7K4000 (HDS724040ALE640)
- Test Setup And Comparison Table
- Benchmark Results: Transfer Diagrams
- Benchmark Results: Interface And Throughput
- Benchmark Results: Access Times And 4 KB Random I/O
- Benchmark Results: I/O Workloads
- Benchmark Results: PCMark 7
- Benchmark Results: Temperature And Power Consumption
- Capacity Marches Forward, Commands A Premium
