Recently, Hitachi announced the latest in their Deskstar line of hard drives, the 7K400 - a 400GB desktop hard drive that was designed to offer high capacity as well as the highest performance levels of any desktop Hitachi drive. Click here to read the full review of the Hitachi Deskstar 7K400 400GB Drive.
Before the Raptor, before 8MB buffers and before its reliability issues, the IBM Deskstar 75GXP was the king of desktop hard disk performance. Unfortunately for IBM's storage division, the drive was plagued with reliability issues. Even more unfortunate was that given its high performance, seemingly everyone had one, and thus, a lot of people had to deal with dead drives, and even dead RMA replacement 75GXPs as well.
After the 75GXP fiasco, IBM did have a handful of other drives that were released, but it wasn't long before the storage division was handed over to Hitachi. On January 1, 2003, Hitachi and IBM entered into a joint venture whereby IBM owns a share of the Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (GST) division and Hitachi handles manufacturing of the hard drives.
In a somewhat odd move, considering the recent history of the Deskstar drives, Hitachi and IBM elected to continue to use the Deskstar name. But with much stronger competition, the Deskstar name is still not as popular among performance enthusiasts as it once was.
Recently, Hitachi announced the latest in their Deskstar line of hard drives, the 7K400 - a 400GB desktop hard drive that was designed to offer high capacity as well as the highest performance levels of any desktop Hitachi drive. We started covering desktop hard drives around the time of Hitachi's announcement, and thus, they were one of the first on our list to pursue for review samples. Not too much later and we were sitting on over a terabyte of storage in the form of Deskstar 7K400 drives.
There's not much revolutionary about the 7K400 that enables it to reach such high capacities. There are two basic methods employed to increase disk capacities: either increase the amount of data that you store on each platter, or increase the number of platters in your drive. In the case of the 7K400, Hitachi continues to use their 80GB platters and simply tacks on another two platters to their older 7K250 drives - resulting in a total of 5 platters.
The use of 80GB platters is a bit disappointing as the 300GB MaXLine III from Maxtor employs three 100GB platters. The benefit of higher density platters is that with more data stored in the same amount of space, higher sequential transfer rates (which matter greatly for desktop performance) are made possible. Generally speaking though, higher density platters and larger buffers should go hand in hand in order to deliver the best overall performance.
Hitach continues to employ an 8MB buffer with the 7K400, once again making this drive more of an evolution of the 7K250 rather than an updated drive designed to compete with the MaXLine III and upcoming offerings from Seagate.
While the 7K400 is available in both Parallel and Serial ATA versions, the drive is a native PATA solution with the SATA version featuring a bridge chip. We have yet to see any performance data suggesting that a bridged solution actually limits performance with current generation drives; that being said, a native SATA drive is still more desirable from a manufacturing, cost and heat standpoint.
The 7K400 uses fluid dynamic bearing motors to enable quiet operation, but we'll touch on just how quiet in our noise test section.
What to do with 400GB?
Thanks to the extra platters, the 7K400 actually feels a little heavier than other 2 or 3 platter drives. It's nothing to worry about, but just an interesting thing to point out.
The drive itself looks much like the older IBM drives, but thankfully, it seems as if the old reliability issues have not been carried over to the new Deskstar line.
With a street price of around $450, the Hitachi Deskstar 7K400 is one expensive animal, but Hitachi has priced the drive about where 2 x 200GB drives would fall, so there's no cost benefit to going with two smaller drives vs. one 7K400 (or vice versa).
With 400GB of storage, the 7K400 offers a great place to store application installation files, disk images, movies, MP3s, games as well as meet any other archival needs that you may have. The thing to keep in mind with a 400GB drive is that the more you fill it , the more you have to worry about backing up. The old saying - the bigger they are, the harder they fall - applies quite well to the 7K400; don't buy a 400GB hard drive without having a good way of backing up that data.
Hard Drive Specification Comparison
| Hitachi Deskstar 7K400 | Maxtor MaXLine III | Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 | Western Digital Raptor II | |
| Maximum Capacity | 400GB | 300GB | 400GB | 74GB |
| Platter Density | 80GB | 100GB | 133GB | 37GB |
| Number of Platters | 5 | 3 | 3 | 2 |
| Average Seek Time | 8.5 ms | 9.3 ms | 8 ms | 4.5 ms |
| Maximum Buffer Size | 8MB | 16MB | 16MB | 8MB |
| Spindle Speed | 7200 RPM | 7200 RPM | 7200 RPM | 10,000 RPM |
| Interface | PATA SATA |
PATA SATA (NCQ) |
PATA SATA (NCQ) |
SATA (TCQ) |
| Availability | Now | Q3 '04 | Q3 '04 | Now |
As you can see by the basic specification comparison, the 7K400 will look much older once the Maxtor MaXLine III and Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 hit the streets next quarter. But for the time being, the 7K400's specifications are competitive with other present-day 7200RPM desktop drives
The Test
You'll notice that the hard drive test bed has been modified a bit to use a motherboard based on the Intel 925X chipset with ICH6. Luckily, the performance difference between this setup and our last test bed is negligible, thus the numbers are entirely comparable. To make sure, we also ran some old tests on the new test bed and the numbers came out with less than 1% variation in performance; definitely nothing major at all.
Our hard drive test bed is designed to shift the bottlenecks, as much as possible, onto the hard drive, but while still within reason. To accomplish that purpose, our test bed is configured as follows:
Intel Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.4GHz
Intel D925XCV Motherboard
1GB DDR2-533 SDRAM
ATI Radeon X800 Pro PCI Express
Creative Labs Audigy
Ultra ATA/100 or Serial ATA 150 cables were used where appropriate
The important drivers used are as follows:
Intel Chipset INF 6.0.1.1002
ATI Catalyst 4.6 Beta (with PCI Express support)
Windows XP Service Pack 1 (no further updates were installed)
What's important to point out is that although we could have outfitted our test bed with 256MB of memory, we wanted to avoid over-exaggerating the performance impact of the hard drive. After all, if your system is swapping to disk a lot, you should be considering a memory upgrade before or in tandem with a hard drive upgrade.
Pure Hard Disk Performance
To measure "pure" hard disk performance, we took a real world benchmark - in this case, the entire Winstone 2004 suite - and used Intel's IPEAK utility to capture a trace file of all of the IO operations that take place during a single run of Business Winstone 2004 and MCC Winstone 2004. We then use IPEAK to play back the trace, much like a timedemo, on each of the hard drives, which gives us a mean service time in milliseconds; in other words, the average time that each drive took to fulfill each IO operation.
In order to make the data more understandable, we report the scores as an average number of IO operations per second so that higher scores translate into better performance.
Keep in mind that these performance scores are best only for comparing pure hard disk performance, and in no way do they reflect the actual real world performance impact of these hard drives.
For descriptions of what the Business and Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004 tests consist of, reference those benchmark pages.
With the exception of the latest generation MaXLine III, the Deskstar 7K400 offers about a 17% performance advantage over the next fastest Western Digital and Maxtor drives.
The 3% performance difference between the Serial and Parallel ATA versions of the 7K400 is basically negligible.
Under the content creation IPEAK test, the 7K400 is able to match the performance of the original 36GB Raptor; this time, offering about a 6% performance advantage over the next fastest 7200RPM IDE drive.
With performance advantages of just 17% and 6% in the two IPEAK tests, we see that the 7K400 is fast enough to hang with the present-day contenders, but you shouldn't expect anything earth shattering in the way of performance.
Final Words
There's not much to say about the performance of Hitachi's Deskstar 7K400 other than it's competitive with anything else out there today. What the 7K400 does offer today is the largest single drive capacity for a desktop hard drive, at 400GB.
Hitachi is the first to the 400GB mark and currently, they are the only one to offer the drive size. So, if that's a requirement of yours, then there's no options to consider other than the 7K400. If this is a purchase that you must make today, there's nothing to complain about when it comes to the 7K400.
If you can wait on that hard drive upgrade, however, much newer technology is coming next quarter. With platter densities finally surpassing the 100GB mark, 16MB buffers to accent and with NCQ becoming mainstream, the 400GB offerings that should hit the streets later this year will hopefully offer more than just massive storage capacities, but maybe even a new level of performance.
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