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Topic: Hard Drive
Product: Hitachi 7K500 - 500 GB SATA 2 Hard Drive
Provided by: Hitachi
Reviewer: K. Elliott
Price: $419.00
TESTING
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Test Setup |
- Motherboard: DFI UT nf4 SLI_SR
- Processor: AMD 3500+
- 2 GB Crucial Ballistic PC-3200 DDR
- Power Supply: Aerocool Turbine Power
- Cooling: Swiftech H2O Water Cooling Kit version 3
- Video Card: HIS Tech X850XL
- Case: Lian Li PC-7077A
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Testing will be done with what is probably the most commonly used software for testing hard drive that being Simpli Software's HDTach. Since the 7K500 arrived set to operate in the SATA 1.5 configuration it offers the perfect opportunity to show the difference between the performance between this setting and the much fast SATA 2 setting.
I should mention before we start there is a way to tell whether or not your current drive is SATA 2 compliant without installing a single piece of software. Simply open up your Control Panel and then go System --> Hardware -->Device Manager and look for IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers and click on either the the top most listed controller if you have a single disk drive installed. Then go to Primary channel and you will see the "Test Speed" button. If your drive is SATA 2 compliant you will see a message similar to this.
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PCMark04 SATA 1
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PCMark04 SATA 2
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You may not notice a big difference here since the type of testing that the Futuremark program does is not ideally suited for testing hard drives and they even admit that themselves. Now lets take a look at a program that was designed to give a more accurate accounting of what a drive is capable of doing.
According to the documentation that comes with HDTach here is a brief description of the "Burst Rate" is determined.
"This benchmark isolates the speed of the interface (IDE,SCSI,1394,USB,etc) that the device is attached to. The burst speed is the maximum speed data can be transferred from a device’s internal cache memory to the CPU. Burst speeds tend to be important when running more than one device on a single interface – the more available burst speed, the better additional devices will perform. This test is also useful as a tool for determining if the drive and interface are operating as expected. If a ATA100 hard drive is attached to an ATA100 IDE controller and the burst result is low (under 66MB/s) it is an indicator that the configuration or compatibility of the devices is incorrect. This can not yield the true burst speed of the interface as there is software and command overhead that slows down the results. We generally achieve results with 10-12% of theoretical maximum – for instance, on an ATA100 bus, we get a burst speed of 90MB/s.
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HDTach using SATA 1 interface
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HDTach using SATA 2 interface
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click to enlarge
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click to enlarge
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Likewise we need an explanation of "Random Access".
This benchmark determines the random access speed of the device. Random access is the average time it takes to retrieve a randomly located sector from the device. Lower random access speeds result in better application and database performance. Random access times can also give insight into the efficiency of the interface a device is attached to by comparing a directly connected device (IDE hard drive) against the same device attached with an internal bus (1394).
To determine the random access time the benchmark will randomly read from a number of sectors on the disk. All reads are timed and the result is the average time.
Surprisingly the random access numbers did not change going from SATA 1 to SATA 2 perhaps this is something that is not affected between the two settings. The one thing that is obvious is that as more data is feed to the system the processor becomes more involved in the equation do to the fact that it is now almost floods the system with data where before it was just cursing along.
CONCLUSION
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Take all the of previous benchmarks and toss them out the window because as soon as you hit the power switch on your computer you will know that you have unleashed some major changes to your system. First off you will notice about 3 to 4 second improvement in load times on all applications. Playing games that stuttered in the past were flicker free this time around, in other words it was like getting the equivalent to a new system just by adding a hard drive.
If you are a record or a movie buff and need a ton of space for all of your projects the Hitachi 7K500 is the answer to your prayer, with speed transfers of upwards of 3Gbits a second you can do more work in less time an them get out and tape some more video,
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| Looking at the "Gigabyte to Dollar" ratio for this drive it figures out to 86 cents per gigabyte, which makes this drive slightly higher that drives of smaller capacity but for the amount of money you are paying you are getting a drive that is one of the fastest drives available as well as the largest in capacity, which in my opinion is worth paying a premium price for. Currently Hitachi is testing 3 Gbits/sec controller on the Silicon Image 3124, Intel ICH7, NVIDIA Nforce 4 and Promise Technology TX300, 2300. one other thing worth mentioning is drives 16 megabytes caches, when playing games such Halflife 2 or Doom 3 where prior to installing the drive the games would hesitate or lag, when the new drive was installed and the games were played under the same settings the games ran perfectly.
Blazing fast speed speed with loads of room to spare the Hitachi 7K600 is a drive that may be ideally suited for movie and music buffs but it will be a welcome addition to anyone's system because of if it outstanding performance and value! |
A special thanks to Hitachi who provided use with this hard drive to review
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