Associate
Right,
About a week ago I bought a new 500GB disk from a very popular supermarket online who had a special offer on 500Gb drives in an enclosure. Since the deal was so cracking (about £125 quid delivered, including the enclosure, supporting both e-Sata and USB2.0) I got one for myself as an extra backup drive.
It turns out the actual hdd is actually a Hitachi Deskstar, one HDT725050VLA360. I was expecting it to be one of the older generation (non perpendicular 5 platter) Hitachi disks, but that cannot possibly be as attested to by this HDTach bench:
(This bench by the way, was with the drive in the enclosure, connected via its e-Sata port to my motherboard's Promise controller.)
Compare that to my Seagate 7200.10 320Gb:
It's clear that the new drive is, in terms of sustained transfer rate, very much the Seagate's equal. The random access average is equally very similar. (The poor burst performance in both cases btw, is likely due to the controller I've got the drives connected to, so don't worry about that.) In fact in these particular runs I did, the Hitachi beat the Seagate by small margin, both in sustained transfer rate average, and random access time (though I expect these differences may be within the margin of measurement variance.)
Other attibutes: Very quiet, you can barely hear it while idling. The enclosure it's in is fanless, so really all you can hear is the drive. You can only really hear it when seeking, and that is pretty muted as well. It's also very cool, temperature wise! I must say I was most impressed by this -- the drive is after all in a passively cooled enclosure, no fan. Normally in my experience, this is looking for trouble, and so I was keenly observing the drives temperatures while I've been testing it. However, to my delight, when left at idle, it stayed between 35C and 39C, which is very very good considering its passively cooled. Event during use it goes up to the low to middle 40's, which I think is also very good and quite acceptable.
So, as I say, I've not checked or looked up the technical specs, but this drive appears to be using perpendicular recording (how else would it be so competitive in sustained transfer) and is just generally a beast. It's fast, quiet, cool and, as a bonus, cheap if you look in the right places. (The special I got has passed unfortunately though...)
I can run more benchies and tests if anyone is interested.
Edit: I've just checked Hitachi's site, it is a Hitachi T7K500 with (and I quote) "new 160GB per platter areal density technology. " (See here and here ) It's not clear whether that means perpendicular recording or not, but suffice to say, the drive does use increased areal density, which means faster speeds, less platters, and consequently greater reliability and less heat. Very nice!
Edit2: Corrected/completed model number details from drive cover (HDT725050VLA360) Interestingly, it's identified as a HDT725050VLA V560 by HDTach. Odd.
Edit3: For reference, the drive has 3 platters and 6 heads (see here )
About a week ago I bought a new 500GB disk from a very popular supermarket online who had a special offer on 500Gb drives in an enclosure. Since the deal was so cracking (about £125 quid delivered, including the enclosure, supporting both e-Sata and USB2.0) I got one for myself as an extra backup drive.
It turns out the actual hdd is actually a Hitachi Deskstar, one HDT725050VLA360. I was expecting it to be one of the older generation (non perpendicular 5 platter) Hitachi disks, but that cannot possibly be as attested to by this HDTach bench:
(This bench by the way, was with the drive in the enclosure, connected via its e-Sata port to my motherboard's Promise controller.)
Compare that to my Seagate 7200.10 320Gb:
It's clear that the new drive is, in terms of sustained transfer rate, very much the Seagate's equal. The random access average is equally very similar. (The poor burst performance in both cases btw, is likely due to the controller I've got the drives connected to, so don't worry about that.) In fact in these particular runs I did, the Hitachi beat the Seagate by small margin, both in sustained transfer rate average, and random access time (though I expect these differences may be within the margin of measurement variance.)
Other attibutes: Very quiet, you can barely hear it while idling. The enclosure it's in is fanless, so really all you can hear is the drive. You can only really hear it when seeking, and that is pretty muted as well. It's also very cool, temperature wise! I must say I was most impressed by this -- the drive is after all in a passively cooled enclosure, no fan. Normally in my experience, this is looking for trouble, and so I was keenly observing the drives temperatures while I've been testing it. However, to my delight, when left at idle, it stayed between 35C and 39C, which is very very good considering its passively cooled. Event during use it goes up to the low to middle 40's, which I think is also very good and quite acceptable.
So, as I say, I've not checked or looked up the technical specs, but this drive appears to be using perpendicular recording (how else would it be so competitive in sustained transfer) and is just generally a beast. It's fast, quiet, cool and, as a bonus, cheap if you look in the right places. (The special I got has passed unfortunately though...)
I can run more benchies and tests if anyone is interested.
Edit: I've just checked Hitachi's site, it is a Hitachi T7K500 with (and I quote) "new 160GB per platter areal density technology. " (See here and here ) It's not clear whether that means perpendicular recording or not, but suffice to say, the drive does use increased areal density, which means faster speeds, less platters, and consequently greater reliability and less heat. Very nice!
Edit2: Corrected/completed model number details from drive cover (HDT725050VLA360) Interestingly, it's identified as a HDT725050VLA V560 by HDTach. Odd.
Edit3: For reference, the drive has 3 platters and 6 heads (see here )
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