Benchmarks, Continued
I/O Performence
Conclusion
In many ways, the Hitachi DeskStar 7K400 is identical to its predecessor, the 7K250: Technical data and performance data are nearly the same, although the 400 GB drive heats up a little more. Since the production process has matured over one year, we do not anticipate any problems due to the five-platter design. To further support this premise, Hitachi offers a three-year warranty. So users looking for storage capacity for growing amounts of data get a good deal with the Hitachi model. The debate surrounding the failure risk of a multi-platter drive also has to be rekindled in the context of 2 TB RAID arrays, for example: With just five drives, this can be realized immediately, while eight times 250 GB were required so far. This means the risk of failure is 60% greater than with five drives.
In comparison, Maxtor's MaXLine III focuses on customers who are seeking additional technical finesse, a fact underscored by native Serial ATA with Command Queuing, 16 MB cache and 100 GB per platter. Working with Intel's ICH-6 Southbridge, the Maxtor drive generates high I/O and application performance, which we could not quite reach with our reference test system - the reason for this is the early firmware version, which should operate much faster at the actual time of delivery. However, both models will, for now, be limited to premium users. Indeed, the 7K400's price tag of around $400 does not exactly make it a bargain. But if you don't need to buy a hard drive right away, waiting until the fall may pay off, because Seagate and Western Digital are also working on really large-capacity hard drives as well.
