Holiday Buyer's Guide 2007 Part 4

Hitachi Deskstar E7K500 500 GB Hard Disk

By Ed Tittel

Hitachi is a leading storage company, whose Deskstar offerings have been on the market for some time. Although the E7K500 does not support perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR), its price per gigabyte comes out roughly the same as the Seagate 7200.10 drive of the same capacity: $0.248 for the Hitachi versus $0.22 for the Seagate. Throw in SATA 2 support, 16 MB of cache, and Native Command Queuing, and you've got a an entirely workable offering.

Hitachi sent us a special package of the E7K500 that let us show the drive's innards.

In terms of our own 3.5" Hard Drive Charts, the E7K500 is a middle-of-the-road performer. It does best on our Interface Performance and XP Startup metrics, but lags behind on most of the other metrics, except for price/performance and its low cost per gigabyte measurements. A maximum surface temperature of 52° C (125.6° F) indicates that the drive is best housed in close proximity to a fan, or inside a heat diffuser like the Zalman Hard Drive Cooler 2HC2 (though this latter situation will increase the cost per gigabyte by about $0.049).

Good numbers for XP Startup is probably a function of the drive's good cache performance, which works best when multiple streams of data are accessed simultaneously. Given this drive's relatively low cost per gigabyte and its high capacity, it's probably a good choice for the system drive on a mid-range desktop, as long as you take the steps necessary to keep the drive cool and well-ventilated. In my own test machine using the Zalman HD cooler, I observed no temperatures higher than 44° C/111° F, a considerable improvement over the unaided temperatures reported in the Tom's HD charts.

  • trainer051
    XFX Warranty deos not exist here why:

    dead

    Hi, thanks for your message,can you provide more details of the problems you are experiencing.regards Jedy

    no video running on asus motherboard with 4gb ram and win7

    Hi , thanks for your message. would it be possible to try the card in another system just to double check that it is the VGA card that is broken, please update us, regards Jedy

    It has been tried in two other system and result were the same. THIS VIDEO CARD IS DEAD - NOT WOPRKING

    Hi, sorry to hear the card does appears at fault here. Please contact your supplier for more details. thanks Jedy

    After a long waiting, XFX is not honoring their responsibility for warranty. That is very bad. The retailer is no longer in business.

    Hi,Thanks for the update. please note that warranty is only officially with the reseller. We provide support for XFX products up to 2 yrs from the date of manufacturer, including a courtesy RMA service where it is difficult for people to obtain RMA service from the reseller, but please note that as your product was manufactured well over 2 yrs ago, I`m sorry we cannot help here. Best Regards.Jedy
    Reply