Hitachi 7K1000 1TB Hard Drive

We have with us the world’s first Terabyte or 1000 GB internal hard drive - the Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000. There are a couple of firsts with the 7K1000 and one of them is the 32MB buffer or cache memory used with the 7K1000. A hard drive cache stores the most recent reads requests made to the disc and also pre-fetches the information that is most probably going to be requested like the sector or the sectors succeeding the information just requested. This improves performance as the number of accesses to the hard drive are reduced.

And finally this is the first drive from Hitachi in the 3.5-inch category (3.5-inch is the form factor of desktop hard drives whereas 2.5-inch for laptop hard drives) that features PMR (Perpendicular Magnetic Recording). PMR is used to increase the areal density of the storage media to meet such a large capacity. Perpendicular recording is capable of giving up to 10 times the storage density of the conventional longitudinal recording. Seagate first used PMR in their 750GB hard drive.

Hitachi has used five platters for the 7K1000, each nearly 200 GB. The downside of using five platters is that it affects the response time of the hard drive as well as increases the temperature. The response time of a hard drive is the time between when the data is requested by the CPU to the time the first byte from the hard drive actually reaches it.

We all know how important good marketing is and hard drive manufacturers are no different. Your operating system employs the binary system of zeros and ones and for it 1KB = 1024 bytes, whereas the manufacturers like using the decimal system for advertising the hard drive capacities and according to them — 1KB = 1000 bytes. Consequently, 1MB according to the binary system would be — 1MB = 1024 x 1024 = 10,48,576 bytes whereas according to the decimal system 1MB = 1000 x 1000 = 10,00,000 bytes. This difference rises exponentially as we run into gigabytes. Secondly, formatting the hard drive takes some space off it. Bottom line, the formatted capacity of the drive is 931 GB. That’s almost 70 gigs taken off it and is little less than the formatted capacity of an 80GB hard drive.

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Specification Table

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Performance
We have pitted this drive against one of the fastest drives available - the WD1500ADFD 150 GB Raptor, from Western Digital. It’s a 10,000 RPM drive with a 16MB cache and uses the SATA 1.5 Gb/s interface as compared to the 3 Gb/s interface used by the Hitachi.

Test System
AMD X2 4800+
Asus M2N32-SLI
Kingston HyperX DDR2 800
Primary OS HDD: Western Digital WD740 Raptor
OS: Windows XP SP2

Everest 2006 Ultimate Edition — Disk Benchmark

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PCMark 2005
All the test descriptions are taken from PCMark 2005’s whitepaper.

For these tests, RankDisk, an application developed by Intel is used. RankDisk is used to record a trace of disk activity during usage of typical applications. These traces can then be replayed to measure the performance of disk operations for that usage. RankDisk records disk access events using the device drivers and bypasses the file system and the operating system’s cache. This makes the measurement independent of the file system overhead or the current state of the operating system. The traces contain different amount of writing and reading on the disk; total ratio in the HDD test suite disk operations is 53% reads and 47% of writes.

The following traces are used:

Windows XP Startup: This is the Windows XP start trace, which contains disk activities occurring at
system start-up. The test is 90% read and 10% write. This trace contains no user activity.

Hitachi 7K1000 1TB : 11.674 MB/s
Western Digital Raptor 150 GB WD1500ADFD : 11.745 MB/s

Application Loading: This is a trace containing disk activities from loading various applications. It includes opening and closing of the following applications:
Microsoft Word
Adobe Acrobat Reader 5
Windows Media Player
3DMark 2001SE
Leadtek Winfast DVD
Mozilla Internet Browser
The application loading trace is 83% reads and 17% writes.

Hitachi 7K1000 1TB : 10.126 MB/s
Western Digital Raptor 150 GB WD1500ADFD : 10.678 MB/s

General Hard Disk Drive Usage: This trace contains disk activities from using several common applications. These are: Opening a Microsoft Word document, performing grammar check, saving and closing, Compression and decompression using Winzip, Encrypting and decrypting a file using PowerCrypt, Scanning files for viruses using F-Secure Antivirus, Playing an MP3 file with Winamp, Playing a WAV file with Winamp, Playing a DivX video using DivX codec and Windows Media Player
Playing a WMV video file using Windows Media Player, Viewing pictures using Windows Picture Viewer
- Browsing the internet using Microsoft Internet Explorer, Loading, playing and exiting a game using Ubisoft Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon. The General Usage trace is 60% read and 40% write.

Hitachi 7K1000 1TB : 9.061 MB/s
Western Digital Raptor 150 GB WD1500ADFD : 10.122 MB/s

Virus Scanning: Virus scanning is a critical task in today’s PC usage. As the major bottleneck of scanning viruses is in hard disk activity, it is reasonable to include virus scanning as a HDD test. The test consists of HDD activity of scanning 600MB of files for viruses. The Virus Scanning test is mostly disk reading (99.5%).

Hitachi 7K1000 1TB : 103.217 MB/s
Western Digital Raptor 150 GB WD1500ADFD : 93.581 MB/s

File Write: This trace contains disk activities from writing. Disk idle times have been compressed to 50 milliseconds that was the smallest idle time interval that tests are reported in Megabytes processed per second.

Hitachi 7K1000 1TB : 80.481 MB/s
Western Digital Raptor 150 GB WD1500ADFD : 86.427 MB/s
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Surface Temperature
Hitachi 7K1000 1TB : 47 Degrees Celcius
Western Digital Raptor 150 GB WD1500ADFD : 41 Degree Celcius

Conclusion
Recently our IT department carried out a major upgrade and replaced all the 750GB hard drives they were using in their 24-bay servers with the 1 TB 7K1000. The primary reason for the replacement was to increase the per-bay capacity from 750 GB to 1TB.

The 7K1000 costs Rs. 19,300 and comes with a 3 year warranty. On the other hand a 500GB hard drive would set you back by around Rs. 6700. Two of them together would cost you a little more than Rs. 13,000. So the Rupee/GB ratio turns out to be a little expensive for the 1TB drive. So unless you are really strapped for SATA ports or drive bays you should opt for two or more 500GB hard drives or wait for prices to come down. Trust me hard drive prices fall pretty rapidly.

Otherwise the transfer speeds of the hard drive with a spindle speed of 7200 RPM as compared to the 150 GB 10,000 Raptor are very good though it runs a little hot.