by Andrey Kuznetcov
08/14/2006 | 10:41 AM
2.5” hard disk drives with a spindle rotation speed of 7200rpm and large storage capacity are not yet widespread in the market, so each such model provokes a genuine curiosity in a hardware reviewer. Not long ago we offered you a comparative test of a large group of 7200rpm hard drives with different capacities and now we are going to add to it with a review of a hard drive from Hitachi’s Travelstar 7K100 family that has the above-mentioned characteristic traits and a storage capacity of 100 gigabytes.
Let's meet our hero.
We once reviewed the closest relative of this drive, its version with the Serial ATA interface (HTS721010G9SA00). The HTS721010G9AT00 model is equipped with a Parallel ATA interface (ATA-6) and the rest of its characteristics are the same as the Serial ATA version has: 100MB capacity, 8MB buffer, 7200rpm spindle rotation speed, <10ms average read seek time, and 4.2ms latency. The drive has good acoustic characteristics thanks to the improved design and fluid dynamic bearings. Enhanced Adaptive Battery Life Extender technology implemented in the device helps reduce the amount of power consumed. The high reliability of the drive should also be mentioned: it can withstand an operating shock of 300G and a non-operating shock of 1000G. TruTrack technology ensures stable and correct operation of the drive under strong external vibration and shock. The dimensions of the device are 100 x 70 x 9.5 millimeters; its weight is 115 grams.
The average retail price of the drive is $195.
The following testing utilities were used:
Testbed configuration:
We installed the generic OS drivers for the drives and formatted them in FAT32 and NTFS as one partition with the default cluster size. In certain cases 32GB partitions were created on the drives and formatted in FAT32 and NTFS with the default cluster size, too.
We will evaluate the HTS721010G9AT00 drive by comparing it with three earlier-tested products that also have a spindle rotation speed of 7200rpm, a capacity of 100GB and an 8MB buffer (for details see our rpevious article called 2.5-Inch Hard Disk Drives with 7,200rpm Speed: Five Models Tested). For detailed specifications of the drives follow this link.
This low-level benchmark helps explore the speed characteristics of a hard disk drive as it is performing sequential reading and writing. The utility is sending a stream of read and write requests with a request queue depth of 4. The size of the requested data block is changed each minute, so we will see the dependence of the driver’s linear read/write speed on the size of the data block.
The linear read speeds of the drives are shown in the first diagram. The Hitachi HTS721010G9AT00 – the drive we are interested in – has a higher speed than its Serial ATA version, but both are slower than the two drives from Seagate when reading small-size data blocks.
The sequential write diagram resembles the previous one: the Hitachi HTS721010G9AT00 looks somewhat better than its Serial ATA version, but both are slower with small data blocks than the drives from Seagate.
Here is the data-transfer diagram for the Hitachi HTS721010G9AT00 drive:
The speed is over 50MB/s at the beginning, the shape of the graph betraying no defects.
We will first check the drives in FAT32 by creating one 32GB partition on them. It is High-End Disk WinMark that is the more important of the two WinBench scores.
So, the Hitachi HTS721010G9AT00 beats its opponents, including its own Serial ATA version. It has the highest High-End Disk WinMark as well as the highest Business Disk WinMark score. The difference in the performance of the Hitachi drives with Parallel ATA and Serial ATA interfaces is too big to be disregarded as a measurement error.
But what if we use NTFS?
The Hitachi HTS721010G9AT00 is again victorious. Its High-End Disk WinMark and Business Disk WinMark scores are both higher than its opponents’.
The last diagram in this section shows the read speed at the beginning and end of each drive. Note that both the drives from Hitachi have almost identical speeds, and they are both faster than the drives from Seagate.
Now we will check the real-life performance of the hard disk drives in our own FC-Test utility which measures the time it takes to create (i.e. write), read and copy certain file-sets which differ in the number and size of the files included, and then calculates the speed of the drive. This utility gives you an objective picture of performance because it emulates the real operating situations for the hard drive.
The Windows and Programs patterns consist of many small-size files, while the MP3, ISO and Install patterns include fewer files of a bigger size. Two 32GB partitions are created on the drives for the copy operations, and the file-sets are then copied within one partition (Copy Near) and from one partition to another (Copy Far). The creation (writing) and reading of the file-sets is done in the first partition.
The drives will be first tested with FAT32.
The first diagram shows the speed of creating (i.e. writing) the file-sets. The Hitachi HTS721010G9AT00 wins the two patterns that consist of a lot of small files. In the other three cases it is faster than its Serial ATA version, but slower than either of the Seagate drives.
The Hitachi HTS721010G9AT00 is the absolute winner when reading all the five file-sets. Note, however, that its speed isn’t much higher than that of its Serial ATA version.
The Hitachi HTS721010G9AT00 also looks better than the others when copying files within the same disk partition. It is a little ahead of its Serial ATA version and is also faster, except for one instance, than the Seagate drives.
It’s similar to the previous diagram: the Hitachi HTS721010G9AT00 is again the fastest drive by the results in all the patterns. And it is also just a little faster than its Serial ATA version.
Let’s now see what we have with NTFS.
The Hitachi HTS721010G9AT00 is far from leadership in this test. It creates files at a slightly higher speed than its Serial ATA mate and is ahead of the Seagate ST910021AS when processing small files. It is the Seagate ST910021A with the classic Parallel ATA interface that is the fastest here.
The pair of Hitachi drives is confidently ahead of the Seagate duo in the test of reading the file-sets. The PATA version of the Hitachi drive is a little ahead of the SATA one.
The Hitachi drives have almost the same speeds when copying files within the same partition, but the HTS721010G9AT00 is preferable between the two. It is not an indisputable leader in this test, though, because the Seagate ST910021A proves to be faster with the two patterns that consist of large files.
And finally we are copying files from one partition to another. The HTS721010G9AT00 is again a little ahead of its Serial ATA version and, like in the previous case, is slower than the Seagate ST910021A in the two patterns that consist of large files.
We will use PCMark04 to see a fuller picture of the performance of the tested hard disk drives. This program benchmarks the drive in four different modes: Windows XP Startup is the typical disk subsystem load at system startup; Application Loading is the disk activity at sequential starting-up and closing of six popular applications; File Copying measures the HDD performance when copying a set of files; the Hard Disk Drive Usage parameter reflects the disk activity in a number of popular applications. These four parameters are used to calculate the overall performance rating according to the following formula: HDD Score= (XP Startup Trace x 120) + (Application Load Trace x 180) + (File Copy Trace x 28) + (General Usage x 265) . For details about the benchmark you can refer to the article called PCMark04: Benchmark for Hard Disk Drives?.
We ran each test ten times and averaged the results. The numbers are listed in the table and represented in the diagrams that follow below.
The Hitachi HTS721010G9AT00 isn’t spectacular in the Windows XP Startup subtest, being in fact the worst drive in it. On the other hand, the difference from the last-but-one Seagate ST910021AS is negligible.
In the Application Loading subtest the hero of this review takes the second place. It is outperformed by the other drive from Hitachi.
The Hitachi HTS721010G9AT00 finds itself in the third place in this file copying test.
The Hitachi drives are both better than their opponents from Seagate in the Hard Disk Drive Usage parameter, but the HTS721010G9AT00 model is slower than the HTS721010G9SA00.
The final diagram shows the overall performance scores of the participating drives. The HTS721010G9AT00 takes the second place in it, behind the other hard drive from Hitachi.
I hadn’t expected the Hitachi HTS721010G9AT00 to prove to be much different from the HTS721010G9SA00 model because these two drives differ in the interface only. The potential performance of the hard disk itself is far from fully utilizing even the classic Parallel ATA interface, let alone Serial ATA. And my expectations came true in practice: there’s indeed little difference between these two models.
However, it is the Parallel ATA version of the drive that has been a little but better of the two in most of the tests. Since the two drives from Seagate have proved to be generally slower than their opponents, it is the Hitachi HTS721010G9AT00 that can be considered the fastest 100GB hard disk drive with a spindle rotation speed of 7200rpm among all that we have tested in our labs so far.