Do You Need A New Hard Drive With Your Windows 7 Upgrade?

Benchmark Results: Drive Temperature And Power

An 8% reduction in drive temperature is welcome considering that the drive configuration with five platters hasn’t changed between the Deskstar E7K500 and 7K2000.

The same applies to idle power. The new drive requires 18% less (7.6W vs. 9.2W). It should be said that other Hitachi-based drives with fewer platters may only require half the idle power, but they wouldn’t provide the same capacity and performance.

File streaming at maximum throughput requires 15% less power on the new drive (11.4 vs 9.7 W).

Full HD video playback also is 15% more efficient on the 7K2000 (8.8W vs. 7.5W).

High I/O activity still is 13% better when looking at the power numbers (12.7W vs. 11.1W).