Hitachi breaks the 1 TB capacity barrier with a superior hard drive.

These days, the world of hard drives revolves more slowly than the rest of computer hardware; product turnover takes four times as long (a year, say) as other areas of the market, like video cards. In many ways, this slower development is a good thing: the last generation of consumer-oriented mega-sized hard drives maxed out at 750 GBs, far more than most people need, even in these days of massive media collections, multi-gig operating systems and games that require DVD-sized installations. In this light, upping the ante to a full terabyte (1,000 gigabytes) seems superfluous, but more space isn’t the only reason why we look at new hard drives: we want to see if they’re faster at delivering information from all of that space, too. Today, with the Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000, currently the world’s largest consumer hard drive, we aim to do just that via a series of tests.

Installation

A SATA 3.0 GB/s drive, the 7K1000 features the ease of installation that characterizes modern hard drives. However, there is one bad thing worth noting about Hitachi’s latest hard drive: the world’s biggest hard drive does not include instructions on how to install the drive into the world’s newest version of Windows. Supporting Vista is still a bit of a black art, but I’m still surprised, given the hype surrounding this drive, that Hitachi’s engineers did not develop a Vista-compatible version of their disk management utility, or just as importantly, include installation instructions for Vista on their website. Forcing a customer to find information on a competitor’s website probably isn’t a public relations move Hitachi wants to make. In case you’re wondering, by the way, the key is to use the Windows Computer Management utility – Vista detects the drive automatically, but won’t format unless you explicitly tell it to.

Performance

Now for the big question: does the additional 250 GBs affect drive speed at all? In addition to features now standard in SATA drives, like the Perpendicular Magnetic Recording technology that makes these enormous capacities possible, the Hitachi 7K1000 has one advantage over previous generations of hard drives: both the 1 TB and 750 GB versions of the 7K1000 have a 32 MB cache, twice the size of any existing drive. A bigger cache means a faster transfer of information, which is good. However, the drive also features five platters of storage – more platters equals a higher seek time – which is bad. Will those two factors balance each other out? I set up the 7K1000 as a secondary drive in my test bed, which has the following specifications:

• Processor: Intel Core2 Duo e6400 Processor
• Memory: 2 GB of Crucial DDR2 PC2-8500 Ballistix Tracer Dual Channel RAM
• Video Card: Foxconn GeForce 8800 GTS Factory Overclocked Video Card
• Motherboard: XFX nForce 680i LT SLI Motherboard
• Primary Hard Drive: IBM Deskstar 60 GXP 40 GB
• Power Supply: OCZ GameXStream 1010W Power Supply
• OS: Windows Vista
• Testing Software:
• SiSoft Sandra Lite XI.SP2 2007.5.11.35
• Passmark Software PerformanceTest 6.1 (1003) WIN32