Summary: Transfer Of Power Complete
You could already see it coming: When Hitachi brings a drive of these proportions onto the market conspicuously later than Maxtor and WD, its power should also be above that of its rivals.
From a subjective point of view, the drive runs very quietly and stays only minimally cooler than its predecessor. True, it does not come out unscathed by its main rivals in the high-end Winbench 99 2.0 and in write performance, but otherwise it is almost always faster. Higher maximum and average transfer rates, shorter access time, higher I/O performance and better performance in business applications.
Deskstar 7K250 can't do much about the WD Raptor with 10,000 rpm - its advantages are too great because of the high spin rate. But if you take a close look at the results of the two contenders in the individual tests, you will see that the Raptor is clearly faster only in the I/O test and the maximum transfer rates - in the other disciplines, Hitachi's 7K250 has almost caught up. What's more, the Raptor is very expensive and offers only 36 GB capacity. This satisfies the requirements the user places on a system hard drive. But it is not suitable for storing large data sets.
However, we will be up front about it: The 250 GB drives from Maxtor and Western Digital are only negligibly slower and thus are a genuine alternative. Differences in performance can only be subjectively perceived if the hard drive really has to give its all - and in conventional Windows tasks this practically never happens.
But if the Hitachi drive is cheaper to get than the models from Maxtor or WD, then it's our current favorite.
