Thaughts on Hitachi drives

[MadMatty]

What are your thaughts towards Hitachi drives ? Dont seem to find much info on them or recomendations for them, usualy just seagate and wd these days.

I am thinking about getting a new 320gb hd and just wondering what is the better of the overclockers selection.

all 4 (seagate/wd/hitachi/samsung) are sataII ncq, 16mb, but the hitachi boasts the average seek of 8.5ms wheras the others show 8.9.

I am edging towards the samsung, but would like to know if the hitachi could be the better drive.

 

[rpstewart]

The main reason you don't see many recommendations is simply down to where Hitachi are in their product cycle, the current range of drives is quite long in the tooth these days and it'll be a month or so before we see the new 7K1000 range available. I can remember when the 7K250s came out that they were the drives to have (I should know I've got 12 of them) but they've been eclipsed in speed terms by the Seagate 7200.10s and with Seagates 5 year warranty there's not much in the Hitachi's favour.

Now the 7K1000s have the same perpendicular recording technology as the Seagates which boosts data density on the platter, this in turn improves the speed at which data can be read because more passes under the read heads every rotation. The Seagates are getting around 150Mb per platter whereas the Hitachis are going to be 200Mb per platter - so there could be a speed advantage for the Hitachis which could drive recommendations again.

As for a choice of 320Gb disk if I was buying now I'd have the Seagate - I got a couple of the 320Gb ones a couple of weeks back. The sustained transfer rate of the Seagate is about 15-20% more than any of the others can manage and the 5 year warranty is as good as you'll get.