2007 HDD Rundown: Can High Capacities Meet High Performance?

Storage Giants: 500 GB+ And For 24/7 Operation

Hitachi DeskStar E7K500, 500 SATA

If you decide to buy a Hitachi hard drive, please pay special attention to its model number. The T7K500 is a performance drive, while the E7K500 was designed for continuous use and therefore should be more durable. Although the manufacturer warranty doesn't exactly mention it, Hitachi DeskStar hard drives come with a three year-warranty, no more, no less.

Unlike the T7K500, the E7K500 is only available with 500 GB storage capacity and also comes exclusively with 16 MB cache memory. The drive, however, doesn't really provide top notch performance: a maximum of 63 MB/s is a value that was reached two years ago. A surface temperature of 52°C (126°F) is also too high and can be avoided today. The access time of 12.8 ms is especially low among 7,200 RPM drives.

Nonetheless, the E7K500 is special and should not be judged by its performance results alone. Hitachi specifies a mean time between failures (MBTF) figure of 1 million hours, which corresponds to the reliability of enterprise-class hard drives. In addition to that, Hitachi also included its Rotational Vibration Safeguard (RVS) technology, which equalizes vibration transferred by the computer chassis and consequently provides more consistent performance. This is definitely an interesting feature with regard to use in servers.