• Hitachi Deskstar E7K1000 HDE721010SLA

    Hitachi Deskstar E7K1000 HDE721010SLA

    Jayesh Limaye, Dec 02, 2008 1805 hrs IST

    This is a green iteration of the Hitachi terabyte hard drive.

    Good performance, Runs cool, Silent operation, Saves energy.

    Expensive.

    Expert Rating :
    Rating
    mail share

Expert Review

  Previous  





HD Tune File Benchmark


The temperature of the drive was seen to touch 41 degrees centigrade but never crossed this mark. This is therefore one of the cooler running drives, as are most drives today.

SiSoftware Sandra Professional: We created a fresh NTFS partition on the test hard drive and ran the File System benchmark module on the freshly-formatted partition.



The drive returned up an index of 93.35 MB/s and an access time of just 5 ms. The scores are pretty good had we reviewed this drive a few months ago, this would have been the highest scoring drives. As of now, we have the WD VelociRaptor and the recently reviewed Seagate 1.5 TB behemoth topping the charts.

The File Copy Test: In the real-world copy test, we created a 1 GB RAM drive using Farstone Virtual Hard Drive Pro and used this as a host drive for testing the read and write speeds of the Deskstar. This eliminates the need to have a faster host drive and gives the absolute best scores possible by the drive being tested.



We also copied 4 GB of assorted as well as sequential data from one partition of the drive to another to see the internal transfer rate. The results of the file copy test went thus:

4 GB assorted intra-drive: 105 sec (39.01 MB/s)
4 GB sequential intra-drive: 95 sec (43.12 MB/s)

These are very good speeds and indicate that the drive is quite fast in handling internal file transfer operations, which means it is good for server applications.


Verdict

The Hitachi Deskstar E7K1000 HDE721010SLA is an excellent performer and it runs pretty cool. Vibrations are almost non-existent, making it suitable to be used in HTPC. The energy saving features makes it attractive for the power-conscious PC users. With a terabyte of capacity, you can never really be out of disk space, at least for some time to come. The 1.2 million MTBF gives it reliability making it worthy of being used in enterprise environments.

The performance in handling internal file transfer makes it a good drive for server applications. Like most other drives, this drive also comes with a 5-year warranty. After so many positive things, there is one major negative about the drive and that is its price. The drive is priced pretty steeply at Rs.13,500. This took out a lot enthusiasm that we initially had about the drive.

We have recently reviewed the Seagate 1.5 TB, which not only has 50% higher capacity, but is priced a lot lower and performs a lot better. We therefore cannot recommend this drive, since there are options available that are a lot better in almost every aspect.

Test unit sourced from Weber Shandwick

Follow Techtree on Twitter

  Previous  

Do you agree with this Review?
YesNo

Related Links
Buffalo DriveStation 250GB External Storage
Seagate ST3320620AS 320GB Hard Disk
Fusion IO 640GB Flash HDD
Tag keywords
Hitachi Deskstar E7K1000 HDE721010SLA review Hard Disk energy saving features terabyte hard drive.



Discussion Board
(3) Comments
syed sardar
,Hyderabad, on Dec 02, 2008 06:36 PM
Vertict says "...since there are options available that are a lot better in almost every aspect". Then why 4-STAR rating!!?
Report abuse
Jayesh Limaye
,Mumbai, on Dec 03, 2008 10:17 AM
One star in the rating is reserved for the price and this drive lost one whole star there, but elsewhere it is a good drive and therefore doesn't lose any of the other four stars.
Report abuse
syed sardar
,Hyderabad, on Dec 02, 2008 06:38 PM
it also says... "We therefore cannot recommend this drive..."
Report abuse

Opinion Poll