There is a host of terabyte hard drives in the market and therefore is no longer a subject of awe. To make their products better than their competitors, manufacturers are therefore compelled to offer new features. Energy consumption is a sore issue today and we see most companies offering green products that claim to consume less power, thus saving precious electricity, and therefore saving you money in the long run. Hard drives are no exception, and Hitachi, which was the first to bring out a terabyte hard drive, has also brought out another iteration of the same drive, but this one claims to be a lot more energy-efficient. Let's take a closer look at the Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.B.
The drive
The Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.B hard drive boasts of a 1 TB capacity. It is a 3.5-inch desktop hard drive featuring perpendicular magnetic recording technology in its latest generation, with a high areal density. The drive contains three platters with six recording and reading heads and the spindle speed is 7,200 RPM. Unlike the E7K1000 with 32 MB cache, the 7K1000.B comes with 16 MB cache. But we have already seen that there is practically no performance difference between these two cache sizes.
Only a small part of the electronics is exposed below
The drive has the popular SATA interface and power connector. This drive has the SATA II or 3 Gbps interface.
This drive features Hitachi Voltage Efficiency Regulator Technology (HiVERT), which is already there in the Travelstar drives lineup. HiVERT improves the efficiency with which the drives step down the 12V and 5V they draw from the PSU. It also features Thermal Fly-height Control for higher reliability and performance due to better soft error rate. These drives come with Advanced Acoustic Management (AAM) to let them perform silently.
The drive is similar to the E7K1000 in almost every aspect, but there are a few things that are missing. The 7K1000.B drives do not feature Rotational Vibration Safeguard or RVS technology found on enterprise drive E7K1000. RVS serves as an early warning system for the drive by enabling it to sense disturbance in advance and take the necessary steps to stabilize the drive head and maintain the performance.
Unlike its enterprise counterpart E7K1000, this drive doesn't come with Bulk Data Encryption or BDE, which is a hardware encryption of data. Using the BDE, your data can be encrypted on the drive and unlike software encryption, it will not be available even when the drive gets stolen and is connected to another computer, unless the correct password is entered.
These days there is an increasing awareness for greener products and this drive is also one such product. Not only is it acoustically quieter, but it consumes less power as well. Hitachi claims that it consumes up to 43% less power than its predecessor 7K1000.B drive. This goes a long way into its longevity. It is more shock resistant, and can take up to 300G of operational shock. 1.2 million hours MTBF shows that the drive is reliable.
Performance
We connected this drive to our test rig's SATA port to put it through our tailor-made test process. We used benchmarking tools such as H2Bench, HDTach, HD Tune, and SiSoftware Sandra Professional.
H2Bench is a low-level hard drive testing utility and gives an indication of the raw performance of the drive. The drive was not formatted while we conducted this test; it did not hold any file system. The drive returned a score of 211.3 MB/s in the 'core test', which is a very good score. We also measured the access times for the whole disk, and found them to be 12.94 ms for reading and 9.57 ms for writing, which again are good scores.
HDTach RW 3.0.1.0 is yet another low-level test that does not require the hard drive to have a file system.
The overall performance is quite good, as you can see in the above screenshot.
HD Tune Pro 3.50 is a hard disk benchmarking utility capable of performing lower-level as well as file system benchmarks and displaying the result in the form of a graph. We ran the read as well as the write test to measure the transfer speeds, burst speeds, and access time across the entire drive and obtained the results as in the figure.
The results of the HD Tune Pro 3.50 Read Benchmark
And of the Write Benchmark
HD Tune File Benchmark
The temperature of the drive touched 42 degrees centigrade, which is a bit higher than usual.
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 96.30 MB/s and an access time of 7 ms.
And here is the detailed Read benchmark result indicating speeds at different physical positions on the drive.
| Physical position on hard drive | Data transfer speed |
| Speed at position 0% | 117.20MB/s (98%) |
| Speed at position 3% | 119.42MB/s (100%) |
Speed at position 7%
| 117.19MB/s (98%) |
Speed at position 10%
| 116.08MB/s (97%) |
| Speed at position 13% | 116.08MB/s (97%) |
| Speed at position 17% | 106.05MB/s (89%) |
Speed at position 20%
| 111.47MB/s (93%) |
Speed at position 23%
| 104.72MB/s (88%) |
| Speed at position 27% | 114.94MB/s (96%) |
| Speed at position 30% | 111.47MB/s (93%) |
| Speed at position 33% | 112.69MB/s (94%) |
| Speed at position 37% | 108.11MB/s (91%) |
| Speed at position 40% | 96.00MB/s (80%) |
| Speed at position 43% | 100.31MB/s (84%) |
| Speed at position 47% | 103.45MB/s (87%) |
| Speed at position 50% | 101.44MB/s (85%) |
| Speed at position 53% | 95.99MB/s (80%) |
| Speed at position 57% | 96.00MB/s (80%) |
| Speed at position 60% | 95.99MB/s (80%) |
| Speed at position 63% | 88.41MB/s (74%) |
Speed at position 67%
| 91.78MB/s (77%) |
| Speed at position 70% | 89.76MB/s (75%) |
| Speed at position 73% | 88.41MB/s (74%) |
| Speed at position 77% | 83.57MB/s (70%) |
| Speed at position 80% | 80.24MB/s (67%) |
Speed at position 83%
| 75.43MB/s (63%) |
| Speed at position 87% | 76.92MB/s (64%) |
| Speed at position 90% | 69.58MB/s (58%) |
| Speed at position 93% | 69.11MB/s (58%) |
| Speed at position 97% | 64.19MB/s (54%) |
| Speed at position 100% | 59.61MB/s (50%) |
And here is the detailed Write benchmark result indicating speeds at different physical positions on the drive.
| Physical position on hard drive | Data transfer speed |
Speed at position 0%
| 23.11MB/s (16%) |
Speed at position 3%
| 67.82MB/s (47%) |
| Speed at position 7% | 97.17MB/s (67%) |
| Speed at position 10% | 102.61MB/s (71%) |
| Speed at position 13% | 62.96MB/s (44%) |
Speed at position 17%
| 123.61MB/s (86%) |
| Speed at position 20% | 59.52MB/s (41%) |
| Speed at position 23% | 144.17MB/s (100%) |
| Speed at position 27% | 64.91MB/s (45%) |
| Speed at position 30% | 83.62MB/s (58%) |
| Speed at position 33% | 111.54MB/s (77%) |
| Speed at position 37% | 60.53MB/s (42%) |
| Speed at position 40% | 97.32MB/s (68%) |
| Speed at position 43% | 57.88MB/s (40%) |
| Speed at position 47% | 79.65MB/s (55%) |
| Speed at position 50% | 89.69MB/s (62%) |
| Speed at position 53% | 54.46MB/s (38%) |
| Speed at position 57% | 116.72MB/s (81%) |
| Speed at position 60% | 56.79MB/s (39%) |
| Speed at position 63% | 90.79MB/s (63%) |
| Speed at position 67% | 57.77MB/s (40%) |
| Speed at position 70% | 81.13MB/s (56%) |
Speed at position 73%
| 55.50MB/s (38%) |
Speed at position 77%
| 67.30MB/s (47%) |
| Speed at position 80% | 75.53MB/s (52%) |
| Speed at position 83% | 51.67MB/s (36%) |
Speed at position 87%
| 70.47MB/s (49%) |
| Speed at position 90% | 42.45MB/s (29%) |
| Speed at position 93% | 60.34MB/s (42%) |
Speed at position 97%
| 61.27MB/s (43%) |
| Speed at position 100% | 40.75MB/s (28%) |
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 WD HDD. 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 are as follows;
4 GB assorted intra-drive: 93.6 sec (43.76 MB/s)
4 GB sequential intra-drive: 92 sec (44.52 MB/s)
The intra-drive transfer speeds are average and are a lot lower than those seen in the E7K1000.
Power consumption: We have also tested the power consumption of the drive as this is becoming an increasingly important parameter in today's world of green computing. We took the power readings before connecting the drive, after connecting it in the idle state, and while data was transferred internally from one partition to another, so that only this particular drive consumes power and not the host drive. We found that it consumed up to 6 W in idle state, while the power consumption increased to 16 W when the drive is transferring data internally. It clearly exhibits lower power consumption than its predecessor, but there are other drives such as the 2 TB WD20EADS, which consume even less power.
Verdict
The Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.B is an excellent performer and runs pretty silent. Vibrations are almost non-existent, making it suitable to be used in HTPC. The energy saving features makes it attractive for power-conscious PC users. With a terabyte of capacity, you can never really be out of disk space, at least for some time. Its fast intra-drive transfer speeds make it a good choice for multimedia or even server environments.
The 1.2 million MTBF gives it a reliability making it worthy of being used even in enterprise environments. While it has got almost everything right, it does run hotter at 42 degrees centigrade, which makes it hotter than usual. Like most other drives, this drive also comes with a five-year warranty. The drive is priced at Rs.5,990, which is at least 1000 rupees more than other 1 TB hard drives. We therefore cannot recommend this drive since there are options available, which are a lot better in almost every aspect.
Test unit sourced from Weber Shandwick
Specifications
