Hitachi has waded into the 2TB (two terabyte or roughly 2,000GB) hard drive market with not one but two models of internal 3.5-inch SATA 3Gb/sec drives.

On the desktop side of things we have the Deskstar 7K2000 while the server brigade may prefer to look at the Ultrastar A7K2000 reviewed here. Both models use five platters and ten heads to achieve the 2TB capacity which is a true capacity of 1,863GB once the drive has been formatted. There is 32MB of cache and as you would expect the drives have a 7,200rpm spin speed.

The interface is SATA 3Gb/sec (a.k.a. SATA II) which puts the Deskstar and Ultrastar in the mainstream but it also points to something of a problem for Hitachi as these new drives don't have a technical edge over the competition. The 2TB WD Caviar Black and Seagate Barracuda XT drives use four platters rather than the five used by Hitachi. This reduces the cost of components - which is handy - but more importantly it increases the areal density as the data has to be packed more tightly. This means that the read/write heads have less distance to travel from one data block to the next.

Increasing areal density invariably boosts performance and there's another benefit as reducing the number of platters also decreases the levels of noise and heat that are produced by the drive.

Added to that the 2TB Seagate Barracuda XT supports the new SATA 6Gb/secs (SATA III) interface so it looks like the Hitachi drives are up against stiff competition, and so it proved when we strapped the 2TB Ultrastar to our Core i7 test system.

Running the HD Tach 3 benchmark test shows the Ultrastar has an average read speed that is close to the WD 2TB Caviar Black while the average write speed for the Hitachi is faster than the WD.

A real world test of transferring files within the drive takes 20 percent longer on the Hitachi than it does with the WD. This reflects the number of platters in the two drives and hence the areal density so it doesn't come as a surprise.

The industry standard Iometer test shows the Hitachi drive is ten percent slower in Read IOPS than the WD and five percent faster in Write IOPS so the net result is that the Hitachi loses out compared to the WD. The Hitachi is noticeably noisier than the WD Caviar Black.

You'll note that we are reviewing the Ultrastar drive rather than the Deskstar and may wonder about the differences between the two models. The Ultrastar has a rating of 1.2 million hours MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) while the Deskstar is unrated, and Hitachi gives the Ultrastar a five year warranty where the Deskstar gets three years.

The other difference is the price, as the Ultrastar sells for a hefty £243 while the Deskstar is a mere £130. The latter is amazingly cheap for 2TB of reasonably brisk storage, however we have to be crystal clear that we have not reviewed a Deskstar and as a result we are forced to deliver our verdict on the more expensive Ultrastar.

Verdict
Hitachi's 2TB drive cannot match the WD Caviar Black in terms of performance and the Ultrastar is horribly expensive. Take those two facts together and the Ultrastar doesn't look tempting. By contrast the 2TB Deskstar drive looks very cheap and is worth a long, hard look.

Company: Hitachi

Contact: 001 408 717 6000

Tags: serial ata hard disk drive hitachi mean time between failures area density hardware storage universal serial bus