Three Generations Compared: Why Storage Density Matters

Deskstar 7K1000 (Five Platters, 2007)

Original Review, from April 2007

Back in its day, the Desktar 7K1000 was the first 1TB hard drive on the market. Hitachi simply stayed with its proven, but not necessarily optimal five-platter design, which had been used on the previous generation, the Deskstar 7K500. This differed from Seagate’s strategy, which included a 750GB mid-point. The other drive makers, including Hitachi, went straight to 1TB.

The 7K1000 was available at 750GB or 1TB capacities, and was one of the first drives to incorporate 32MB of cache memory. Due to the massive five-platter design, the drive wasn’t power-efficient at all and ran rather hot. However, its 85 MB/s maximum throughput was fast at that time. Obviously, this initial terabyte drive doesn’t stand a chance against current products, even when you put it up against low-power models like Samsung's Spinpoint F2 EcoGreen or the WD Caviar Green.

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