Recently we have taken a look at our HDD section and found that our previous roundup of 1-terabyte models is almost 1 year old. It is an eternity by the standards of the IT industry. Of course, we have been busy writing reviews of 750GB drives and 640GB drives but the pause is rather too long anyway.
First of all, the increased activity of Western Digital must be noted. This company perplexed us in our earlier test session with its HDD that claimed to have a variable spindle rotation speed. When they introduced Caviar Blue and Caviar Black, the brand’s product line-up seemed to get logical and complete. But then Western Digital began to improve its products… First, the Green Power series transitioned to 333GB platters (to get cheaper to make), the older and newer drives getting mixed in storehouses and shops as the consequence. Fortunately, there was a way to tell them apart: the newer drives had two magical letters in their name (WD10EACS-00D6B0) that guaranteed the 3-platter design.
We will be introducing the participating devices in alphabetic order. Coincidentally, first goes the Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000, the first 1-terabyte drive to hit the market. This company had used a five-platter HDD design before and it is thanks to this design solution that Hitachi managed to be the first developer to create a hard disk drive with such a pretty-looking, round value of capacity (while the other developers were waiting for denser platters). We took a note of this HDD earlier, having compared it against its predecessors.
Hitachi offers an enterprise version called Ultrastar A7K1000 but it proved to be so similar to the 7K1000 in our previous test session that we have decided not to include it into this review.
Well, there is nothing extraordinary, actually. The change of logo on the chip is due to the fact that Infineon sold its HDD chip manufacture to LSI in March 2008. So, the logo is different but the chip marking is the same. According to it, Hitachi’s new HDD series have a revised controller that is expected to deliver higher performance.
We’ve got three leaders in terms of 12V consumption. And while we could expect the 3-platter WD Caviar Green drives to be in the lead (they have three platters to spin up to only 5400rpm), it is quite a surprise to see the Seagate SV35.3 in third position. Perhaps it just starts up the way it words, i.e. very slowly, and does not require high current for that. Next go a group of medium-consumption devices. As for the losers, they are all of the 4-platter drives (save for the SV35.3), the WD RE3 and the 3-platter Seagate 7200.11. The latter two drives must have required more power in order to get ready to work in the shortest time possible.
you can take the WD Caviar Black (WD1001FALS) which is somewhat slower but costs much less. The Hitachi Deskstar E7K1000 (HDE721010SLA330) is third in terms of sheer speed.
Then, we also wanted to see the effect of increased recording density and larger cache on HDDs’ performance. It is not easy to answer what is better, actually. Taking the three drives from Western Digital’s Green Power series, we can see that it’s better to have both: the WD10EADS with higher-density platters and maximum cache is the fastest of them.
