[NEWS] - Hitachi 7K250 HDD review

[CougTek]

Since apparently Eugene can't decide when to publish the review of the latest Hitachi despite that the results have been in the database for something like two weeks, here's what someone else had to say about the 7K250 :

Hitachi uses the widely-accepted Marvel Serial ATA Bridge Chip to convert data from Parallel to Serial ATA format. Eight megabytes of Infineon RAM is used for the data buffer. The 250GB model drive in this review makes use of three platters slightly larger than 80GB. Formatted under NTFS, the 250 gigabyte drive model has a “real” capacity of 239 gigabytes, or 257,327,849,472 bytes.

[...]

For this review, the following benchmarking programs were used: HDTach, SiSoft SANDRA, PCMark2002, ATTO, HD Speed, and QuickBench.

Yes, I know, not quite the best benchmarking tools have been used. However, even though the benchmarks are poor, the results are the same as those obtained by SR : the new Deskstar beats all other 7200rpm on the market. The author also confirms that the drive operates very quietly.

BTW, Hitachi has the same warranty policy as Western Digital. All their drives with an 8MB buffer are covered by a three years warranty and their 2MB cache models by a single-year one. For the 7K250, it means that both the 250GB and the 160GB with 8MB of cache feature an acceptable warranty period.

News source

 

[Jan Kivar]

BTW, Hitachi has the same warranty policy as Western Digital. All their drives with an 8MB buffer are covered by a three years warranty and their 2MB cache models by a single-year one. For the 7K250, it means that both the 250GB and the 160GB with 8MB of cache feature an acceptable warranty period.

Following that link reveals that Travelstar drives have also 3yr. warranties! I've always thought that 2.5" drives have 1yr. warranties, especially after the warranty period reduction last fall. Have other 2.5" drive manufacturers more-than-one-year warranties?

Cheers,

Jan

 

[CityK]

Probably ~2x the cost, but being ~7x larger, there really isn't much of an incentive to get a Raptor when you do a comparison of performance for desktop usage.

 

[Tea]

3.5ms? That's plenty. SR's new benchmarks are pretty crap. I only look at the low-level numbers these days - the rest of it is more misleading than helpful.

All depends on your purpose, though. For something like a low-performance second drive for bulk storage, it would be ideal. Personally, though I keep toying with the idea of a Raptor, in the end I don't get one - largely because I just picked up a third X15 - a 2nd generaton one this time, but only 18GB. Mutiah was selling it, so I couldn't resist the chance.

 

[CityK]

I am familiar with the stance you have taken on the SR benchmarks (although I don't remember the majority of your arguments. I would have to reread some of the threads....at least, those that still exist). If I recall, you had some wonderfully decent points. I myself have some apprehension about some elements to the current SR test suite/ideology.

Nonetheless, I do believe, for the most part, that it is pretty much representitive of the performance achieved for general desktop usage. I'm pretty sure that there are others who feel the same way (i.e Coug, edawg...).

I personally don't think the $premium$ of a scsi class drive is worth the extra performance it buys on the desktop (of course there is that old reliability argument but that's beside the point in question). I, like most people, certainly am not hammering my disks with requests. I'm pretty sure I can stand the extra 4-10ms wait with my boring IDE drives.

 

[fool]

7k250 review at SR