Elitists On The Test Bench: Ultra320 Hard Drives With 15,000 RPM

Hitachi UltraStar 15K73

The UltraStar 15K73 is the first fast SCSI drive brought to market under the Hitachi label. Its technical data compare with the competition; as far as performance values went, we found the maverick sometimes up, sometimes down.

The Hitachi is just a shade behind Fujitsu in transfer rates, and can be judged the same in this discipline. The 15K73 performs better in maximum interface performance, even if the difference is once again very slight.

The application benchmarks in Disk Winbench 99 2.0 were disappointing. For a drive with 15,000 rpm, the UltraStar 15K73 only managed an average result, although one that is considerably better than models running at 10,000 rpm. In developing this drive, Hitachi obviously didn't set any store on high application performance - something that's borne out the very tidy IOMeter results. The Hitachi drive above all scores points in the webserver benchmarks.

At 6.3 MS, access time is par for the course, even if a touch longer than its rivals. Because there is no 18 GB version, this will not interest anyone who values performance above all else.

We took this photo from the 15K73's datasheet. The comparatively small disks are easily recognizable.