Hitachi 7K250 120GB Performance

Product(s): 2x Hitachi Deskstar 7K250 120GB SATA HD
Provided By: Hitachi Global Storage Technologies
Price: ~$115CDN ea. (Pricegrabber.ca)

Introduction:

Hard Drive storage has come a long way since the days of 5,400rpm ATA33 2MB cache drives.  Today, drives have increased in spindle speed, cache size, and interface capability.  Drives have increased to ATA66, ATA100, ATA133, and ABIT even featured a short stint at an overclocked ATA150 showing.  As legacy drives have started to fade out, SATA is quickly taking it's place.  The default maximum transfer rate of SATA is 150Mb/sec, and SATAII is now rated at a maximum throughput of 300Mb/sec.  Things have come a long way.

Today we're taking a look at a couple of drives from Hitachi - the 7K250.  The drives that Hitachi sent our way are 120GB SATA drives that feature an 8MB cache and spin at 7,200 rpm.  We're going to take a look at these drives in some synthetic tests and also some real world tests as we try them out as single drives, RAID 1 and RAID 0 on our nForce 4 test system.  Is RAID really all it's cracked up to be in the real world?  How does a single drive from Hitachi perform against a single Western Digital drive?  Keep on reading to find out.

The Drives:

Hitachi sent over a pair of these drives in full retail packaging, and to be honest I've never opened a retail package drive before.  These things are protected better than a couple of US Marines in an A-10 Abrams being fired upon by a couple of rednecks with .22 rifles.  If you need to get some drives shipped you won't have to worry about them getting damaged unless they get ran over by the UPS truck.

These drives carry both standard molex power connectors as well as the SATA Power connectors.  Make sure that you don't hook up both power connectors at the same time, or you could end up cratering your drive.  Most PSU's in the last 6-12 months have SATA connectors, and I think companies could start dropping the Molex connector off of their SATA drives.

Before we continue any further, I'd better make mention that these are some of the quietest drives I've heard my entire life.  There is no whine or steady noise that comes from these drives . . . at least not heard above a stock Athlon 64 HSF running at 800rpm.  They are very quiet and only omitted a very small amount of added noise when seeking.  With your computer case closed, you will not be able to hear them at all.  Being so quiet, they might be the drive of choice for a silent or HTPC system.

Now that we've had a peek at what these drives look like, let's head on over and view some test system specs and look at some performance numbers.