Hitachi Deskstar E7K1000 (1 TB)
Hitachi’s E7K1000 hard drive has been available for many months already, which might partly explain why it isn’t marketed as an eco-centric drive like those from Samsung and WD. Instead, Hitachi focuses on delivering affordable drives capable of supporting 24/7 operation. The E7K1000 is available at 500, 750, and 1,000 GB, and it was designed for maximum reliability with a 1.2 million-hour MTBF (mean time between failure). The company’s Deskstar 7K1000.B, known for its balanced performance and power efficiency, is the core design behind the E7K1000.
The 7,200 RPM drive comes with a SATA/300 interface, NCQ support, and 32 MB of cache, which all help to dominate the other contestants in terms of performance. The drive’s 13.2 ms average read access time is best in show, as is its 118 MB/s sequential read performance Hitachi’s I/O performance isn’t bad, either.
However, Hitachi’s isn’t the fastest drive here. In addition, the new Seagate Barracuda LP drives are so close in terms of throughput that we wonder why anyone would still buy the Deskstar if others deliver the same performance at reduced power consumption. Application performance may be one reason, since Hitachi’s 24/7 drive does well in most PCMark Vantage HDD test runs.
