X-bit labs

Way to the Top: Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 HDD Review (page 15)

Category: Storage

by Sergey Romanov

[ 07/12/2007 | 07:57 PM ]

Conclusion

We would be glad to continue this kind of testing further as it is a real enjoyment. Hard disk performance is currently an annoying limitation of the PC speed in many user tasks like games or professional applications. And our tests show that Hitachi is making a breakthrough after a certain period of stagnation.

They accelerated the electronics with the release of the T7K250 and then they introduced a 16MB buffer in the 7K500. These HDDs were not a total success as they didn’t always show the expected performance benefits, but those 16 megabytes of memory are put to better use in the next generation of HDD electronics, in the T7K500. This somehow affected NCQ support, particularly when it comes to processing two competing read threads, and the copying of large files became somewhat worse, too. The T7K1000 features certain improvements in the firmware and is equipped with 32MB of memory, but still performs oddly with NCQ.

Does the Deskstar 7K1000 support Native Command Queuing at all? We don’t know for sure. Some tests seem to imply a lack of NCQ but IOMeter reports a performance increase as the load grows up, which is typical of NCQ-enabled models. We even suspect that the HDD does not do anything NCQ-related until the load is higher than 2 simultaneous requests. For example, the 7K1000 and T7K500 behave like follows when performing random-address reading:

Otherwise, the newest HDD from Hitachi is almost perfect. It offers a record-breaking storage capacity, an extremely high sequential speed, an enlarged buffer for more performance, and fast processing of multiple data threads. As a result, it performs superbly in all our benchmarks except for IOMeter’s server patterns, but for server applications Hitachi offers the Ultrastar A7K1000. This even gave some hardware reviewers the cause for pitting the Deskstar 7K1000 against the WD1500 aka Raptor II, although the two belong to absolutely different categories. We hope the minor drawbacks of the Deskstar 7K1000 revealed in our tests will help Hitachi’s engineers and programmers to go on improving their products even more.

We want to note that we tested a presale sample of the Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 and this HDD is still being improved. Hitachi has promised to make its 1TB drive even faster. Samsung, Seagate and Western Digital are ready to begin shipping 1TB HDDs, too, so we hope we’ll have the opportunity to compare serial samples of such products from all the manufacturers in our next review.