The differences between the Sequential Read and Write tests are not particularly significant, but the difference of more than a full MB per second in the Random Seek + RW test seems particularly important. To do some further comparisons, I loaded up the baseline benchmarks included in PerformanceMark and checked – and yes, a full MB per second is a significant increase in performance. However, as the summing characteristic, the 38.4-point increase in the Disk Mark score is probably the best indicator of the 7K1000’s superior abilities over the previous generation of hard drives.

Conclusions

As you can see from all of the numbers above, the Hitachi 7K1000 seems to be worth the wait – it’s definitely bigger and faster than the previous generation by every benchmark I ran. However, unless you really, really need the extra 250 GB, you might want to wait on buying this hard drive until the $440 price tag come down, or choose the 7K1000 750 GB model instead – it’s listing at $40 more than the previous generation of 750 GB hard drives and has the same specifications (including that sweet 32 MB cache) as its big brother.