A few days have passed since our comparison of business-class hard drives . At that time, one of the important competitors did not arrive at our laboratory in time, namely, the hard drive from Hitachi, formerly IBM. We had high expectations concerning the newly founded Hitachi Global Storage Group (HGST), so when we got the drive, we made sure to test it as quickly as possible.

Instead of finding the brand new DK32 series drive in the package, we were surprised to find a 146Z10, which has already been available on the market for several months. However, we decided to test this model anyway because it is widely available and should therefore be available in stores for some time to come.

The specifications of the 146Z10 seem to be no different than those of its competitors (namely Fujitsu's MAP-Series, the Maxtor Atlas 10K IV and the Seagate Cheetah 10k.6): all four have an 8 MB cache and run at 10,000 revolutions per minute (rpm). The difference lies inside: while the hard drives of Maxtor, Fujitsu and Seagate manage 146 GB with four platters, Hitachi's UltraStar 146Z10 needs six. For this reason alone, you shouldn't expect it to reach new performance heights. This responsibility will go to the DK32EJ, which will be tested and compared to all of its opponents in a follow-up article. But for now, let's get to it!