New Drive: Hitachi Deskstar 7K2000
Hitachi has not been as quick as Seagate and Western Digital when it comes to releasing a 2TB hard drive. The sweet spot for hard drives clearly is at much lower capacity points, and Hitachi also had spent time improving the existing Deskstar 7K1000 hard drive family. Hitachi’s new generation, called 7K1000.C, will soon be available at increased storage density through single- and dual-platter designs, providing 160GB to 1TB capacities.
Hitachi offers nothing between 1TB and 2TB yet, as the new Deskstar 7K2000 is only available at the 2TB capacity point, according to the company's Web site and data sheet. This is a five-platter drive, and so it compares well to the Deskstar E7K500 in that regard. The high platter count is somewhat surprising given that everyone is trying to reduce complexity. In the end, it doesn’t really matter much, as long as performance and power consumption are at the levels we expect. A dedicated 2TB hard drive roundup will deal with these questions soon.
Regardless of the internal configuration, the new drive is certainly impressive. Some of the test results showed significant improvement when compared to the older Deskstar E7K500. Surface temperature went down from 50°C to 46°C. Throughput has effectively doubled. I/O performance has increased a bit. PCMark Vantage performance went up noticeably, and power consumption went down by 15 percent. For the sake of completeness, we also want to point out that capacity has quadrupled. The only metric that declined was access time, which was slower on the new Deskstar 7K2000.
