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Hitachi Deskstar T7K250 SATA II
Everyone and I mean everyone
went crazy when SATA hit the market what seems like years ago. To our
dismay (I'm including myself of course) it was a meager speed increase
from the 7200RPM 8mb cache drives from the likes of Western Digital and
a few others, mainly in terms of overall desktop use. At that time I had
4 IBM Deskstars running in RAID 0 using a promise card and I was
probably the last person thinking of going to grab some SATA drives just
so I could say I had them. SATA at that time needed some increases to
speed to match its price tag. Well now its a bit different, people are
taking into consideration the benefits of NCQ, smaller cables, and a big
jump in speed.
With Hitachi's purchase of
IBM's hard drive division, Hitachi has definitely worked hard on
improving its reliability without sacrificing its speed. As a matter of
fact these drives will be tested in a RAID 0 configuration and so far
they totally wasted the Raptor's by a significant margin due to its new
SATA II interface, and new design. I will have to say that I have been
flogging these drives for the last three weeks, and I have yet to see
any kind of reliability issues. As mentioned before Hitachi is a good
thing, so come with me as I prove it to you...
Specifications
Features
You gotta hand it to
Hitachi, they know how to package a hard drive. I'm holding onto these
boxes for other things. They are completely padded. I suppose this is
nothing new for those of you that have purchased retail drives before.
We also received a 200 page booklet with all the advanced cylinder
settings. Although that's a nice gesture I kept falling asleep reading
it. The driver and hard drive setup that it comes with comes with the
settings to enable NCQ, although I found that it was already enabled
from the factory. I think Hitachi needs to come out with something like
Seagate Enterprise Tools which allows you to change settings in Windows
so long as its not the primary drive. This would allow you to avoid the
hassles of a DOS prompt. It's 2005, no one uses a floppy anymore.
Half a terabyte love...
As far as the specifications of this drive the label
doesn't tell you much, but it does mention the website where you can
look it up. Keep in mind that this is a test sample so it may be a bit
different then the retail version even our samples came in retail boxes.
You can clearly see the SATA
connections here. You can't really see much more than a hard drive at
this point, nor can you really distinguish the build quality and whether
or not its good, mostly because almost every hard drive looks like this.
I can say that these drives run much cooler than any drive I've ever
come across though. The use of a heatsink designed chassis is
unnecessary for these drives.
As
mentioned before these drives come well packaged and just to play safe
we recommend you rest the drive on their static proof bags until you
install them. Proper grounding is all about being safe rather than
sorry, and just touting the bag around with the drive is a good idea.
You may actually want to hold onto the bags, since they come in handy
for storing other items like ram and video cards.
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