Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 in RAID 0: Is Two Terabytes really better than One?
by Gary Key on April 19, 2007 12:15 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Features and Specifications
The external design of the Hitachi 7K1000 is the same as the majority of the TK or K series drives. The drive is based on the industry standard 3.5" form factor platform with the pertinent part number and warranty information embossed on a white sticker on the top of the casing. Our OEM sample was graciously provided by Dell and does not include this information, but looking at the retail label we did not miss anything of importance. The only other differences between the OEM and retail units is the inclusion of an accessory cable kit, HD Feature Tool software (that can be downloaded separately), and the obligatory retail box.
The Deskstar 7K1000 ships with Serial ATA data and power connectors along with a 4-pin Molex power connector designed for use with older ATX power supplies. Our OEM unit did not contain the 4-pin Molex power connector, but the retail model has it. The 32MB of cache memory and controller logic is located on the outer side of the PCB with the same components being utilized on each version of the drive. Our retail drive arrived with firmware revision GKA0A51D compared to GKA0A51C. We did not notice any measurable differences in performance between the two drives.
The Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 is the first 1TB drive to ship based upon manufacturer's specifications with a 750GB offering scheduled for release in the upcoming weeks. Of course the actual capacity of the drive is 931.5GB, but due to the way manufacturers report capacity the drive is considered to be a 1TB offering. If we want to be technically accurate, 1TB = 1,000,000,000,000 bytes and 1TiB (Tebibyte) = 1,099,511,627,776, so the formatted capacity is 931.5GiB (Gibibytes). This drive is also Hitachi's first 3.5" hard drive to use PMR technology. Additional 1TB versions for the Enterprise and DVR/Set-Top markets will be released later this year.
The 7K1000 features a 5-platter/10-head perpendicular magnetic recording design with rotational speeds of 7200 RPM. The cache size has been increased to 32MB from the previous 16MB on the TK series. Hitachi includes their ramp load/unload, advanced low-power idle modes, and thermal-fly height control technologies. This drive series also supports Native Command Queuing and hot-swap capabilities. The Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 drives ship with a three year warranty and additional specifications can be found here.
The Hitachi 7K1000 drives we are reviewing today will be compared directly against the WD WD1500AHFD 150GB drives in RAID 0 with a limited benchmark test suite. Our stripe size is set to the recommended default in the NVIDIA driver set, which in this case is 64KB. We fully understand that different stripe and allocation sizes may result in possible improvements in performance based upon the application being tested, but testing these aspects is beyond the scope of this article.
We have also included a subset of drive results from our previous articles and will provide additional RAID 0+1 and 5 results of the 7K1000 in our upcoming RAID performance overview that will also feature Intel chipsets and hardware controllers. Today's article also contains results in our iPeak and Application benchmarks with AAM on / NCQ on as the default score and AAM off / NCQ on as the alternate score for the 7K1000. In a couple of benchmarks we noticed results with AAM off / NCQ off provided additional performance increases of around 1% but our recommendation with the drive is to leave AAM and NCQ on for the best blend of performance and acoustics.
The external design of the Hitachi 7K1000 is the same as the majority of the TK or K series drives. The drive is based on the industry standard 3.5" form factor platform with the pertinent part number and warranty information embossed on a white sticker on the top of the casing. Our OEM sample was graciously provided by Dell and does not include this information, but looking at the retail label we did not miss anything of importance. The only other differences between the OEM and retail units is the inclusion of an accessory cable kit, HD Feature Tool software (that can be downloaded separately), and the obligatory retail box.
The Deskstar 7K1000 ships with Serial ATA data and power connectors along with a 4-pin Molex power connector designed for use with older ATX power supplies. Our OEM unit did not contain the 4-pin Molex power connector, but the retail model has it. The 32MB of cache memory and controller logic is located on the outer side of the PCB with the same components being utilized on each version of the drive. Our retail drive arrived with firmware revision GKA0A51D compared to GKA0A51C. We did not notice any measurable differences in performance between the two drives.
| Hard Drive Specifications | |||
| Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 1000GB HDS721010KLA330 | Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 750GB ST3750640AS | Western Digital Raptor 150GB WD1500ADFD | |
| Manufacturer's Stated Capacity: | 1000.2GB (1TB/Terabyte) |
750GB | 150GB |
| Operating System Stated Capacity: | 931.5 GB | 698.6 GB | 139.73 GB |
| Interface: | SATA 3Gb/s | SATA 3Gb/s | SATA 1.5Gb/s |
| Rotational Speed: | 7,200 RPM | 7,200 RPM | 10,000 RPM |
| Cache Size: | 32 MB | 16 MB | 16 MB |
| Average Latency: | 4.17 ms (nominal) | 4.16 ms (nominal) | 2.99 ms (nominal) |
| Read Seek Time: | 8.5 ms / 14ms Silent | 11 ms | 4.6 ms |
| Number of Heads: | 10 | 8 | 4 |
| Number of Platters: | 5 | 4 | 2 |
| Power Draw Idle / Load: | 8.1W / 12.8W | 9.3W / 12.6W | 9.19W / 10.02W |
| Power Draw Silent I / L: | 4.3W / 9.9W | - | - |
| Command Queuing: | Native Command Queuing | Native Command Queuing | Native Command Queuing |
| Warranty: | 3 Year - Retail or OEM | 5 Year - Retail or OEM | 5 Year - Retail or OEM |
The Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 is the first 1TB drive to ship based upon manufacturer's specifications with a 750GB offering scheduled for release in the upcoming weeks. Of course the actual capacity of the drive is 931.5GB, but due to the way manufacturers report capacity the drive is considered to be a 1TB offering. If we want to be technically accurate, 1TB = 1,000,000,000,000 bytes and 1TiB (Tebibyte) = 1,099,511,627,776, so the formatted capacity is 931.5GiB (Gibibytes). This drive is also Hitachi's first 3.5" hard drive to use PMR technology. Additional 1TB versions for the Enterprise and DVR/Set-Top markets will be released later this year.
The 7K1000 features a 5-platter/10-head perpendicular magnetic recording design with rotational speeds of 7200 RPM. The cache size has been increased to 32MB from the previous 16MB on the TK series. Hitachi includes their ramp load/unload, advanced low-power idle modes, and thermal-fly height control technologies. This drive series also supports Native Command Queuing and hot-swap capabilities. The Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 drives ship with a three year warranty and additional specifications can be found here.
The Hitachi 7K1000 drives we are reviewing today will be compared directly against the WD WD1500AHFD 150GB drives in RAID 0 with a limited benchmark test suite. Our stripe size is set to the recommended default in the NVIDIA driver set, which in this case is 64KB. We fully understand that different stripe and allocation sizes may result in possible improvements in performance based upon the application being tested, but testing these aspects is beyond the scope of this article.
We have also included a subset of drive results from our previous articles and will provide additional RAID 0+1 and 5 results of the 7K1000 in our upcoming RAID performance overview that will also feature Intel chipsets and hardware controllers. Today's article also contains results in our iPeak and Application benchmarks with AAM on / NCQ on as the default score and AAM off / NCQ on as the alternate score for the 7K1000. In a couple of benchmarks we noticed results with AAM off / NCQ off provided additional performance increases of around 1% but our recommendation with the drive is to leave AAM and NCQ on for the best blend of performance and acoustics.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
48 Comments
View All Comments
userexists - Thursday, April 19, 2007 - link
As I understand it, from previous articles, the limiting factor in gaming tests seems to be the CPU. I understand why you'd want to use an Opteron or Xeon system for benchmarking the access patterns -- the only people who care about those results are probably going to be running servers. But most people playing games aren't using server components. I'd love to see how the QX6800, for example, and some fast RAM affects gaming benchmarks under RAID-0 -- i.e. answer the question of whether the CPU bottleneck has been relieved. Probably not, but who knows until you test it, right?Gary Key - Sunday, April 22, 2007 - link
I will have some Intel benchmarks with a QX6700 up this week although I doubt the results will be that surprising. ;-)cbuchach - Thursday, April 19, 2007 - link
For all the arguing, NO ONE can say that RAID0 is overall slower. In most situations it is faster by varying degrees, maybe a percent or two or maybe more. For enthusiasts, the percent counts. Look at heatsinks or overclocking. Someone may spend an extra $50 for a better heatsink, for what, maybe an increased overlcock from 3300 MHz to 3400 MHz or spend lots of cash for a water cooling setup, or spend an extra $100 for slightly better RAM; the list goes on and on. For real enthusiasts, the extra 1-2% counts.(And as far as data loss goes, everyone should backing up all their nonrecoverable data data anyways, so that point is moot.)
tshen83 - Thursday, April 19, 2007 - link
and don't even talk about performance, people who want performance will buy Raptors X or SCSI drives. this drive is for storage. RAID storage for cheaptshen83 - Thursday, April 19, 2007 - link
yes, backing up 2TB of data, with what? probably a RAID1(takes 4 drives to have 2TB) or RAID5(3 drives) of the same drives. so why not just use RAID1 or RAID5 in the beginning?ncage - Thursday, April 19, 2007 - link
I just wish hitachi would make this drive in something other than 1TB. I love hitachi hard drives and just which this awesome thing would come in like a 500GB or something like that.Ncage
Gary Key - Thursday, April 19, 2007 - link
750GB drives will be available in May, the smaller capacities later this summer.TomWomack - Thursday, April 19, 2007 - link
What I'd be much more interested by is a review of performance for a pair of these drives in RAID1. RAID1 read speed ought to be the same as RAID0, and most disc-limited tasks are read-limited, whilst running drives in RAID1 seems a sensible reaction to the combined unreliability and cheapness of modern HDDs.[also you can break a RAID1 mirrored pair and grovel for deleted data on one of the drives while running the computer happily on the other, which I've found useful in the past]
Watson - Thursday, April 19, 2007 - link
I would love to see if useful speed increases are actually available over multiple drives when splitting OS and cache files from applications vs. Raid 0. I have a Raid 0 on 10k Raptors in my machine, and they are very fast (obviously), but I have often wondered in a reinstall if I would be better off splitting the drives and what is put on them. Any thoughts?yyrkoon - Thursday, April 19, 2007 - link
If you are wondering if booting from this array would be slower, or faster, the chances are with RAID0 if anything, the array will boot slower vs a single Raptor. The reason behind this is simple: booting windows, HDDs benifit more from faster access times, and RAID0 will increase random access times. RAID1 on the other hand, could help some here, but it really depends on the controller(RAID1 paired with the right controller can actually decrease access times, but it will not be a huge difference).Now, all that being said, there is a reason why systems, where speed, and redundancy is crucial, people opt for RAID10. Obviously, there is the redundancy factor, but you can get the from RAID5 as well as speed if enough drives are used. Pretty much, you get the best of both worlds having a RAID10 array, faster access times, and throughput. This performance of course comes at a cost, you need a minimum of 4 HDDs, so for instance, using 4x 1TB Hitachi drives, we are talking in the balpark of $1600 for a bare minimum + controller capable of handling RAID10.
When it is all said and done, unless your system is serving thousands of people data every hour of the day, heavily editing video, or some other similar task you do not need this kind of disk performance. Also, for the life of me, I can not see how making one large disk array, for your OS, and putting all your data on this array is going to help things either. Personally, I think it is much smarter, to use a single fast disk for the OS, and perhaps multiple drives for data, keeping everything seperate. As for using RAID, well, I can see an application for it, even in the home, but not for the OS.
Think about it, what is so important about the OS that you need redundancy for it ? Nothing, plain and simple. Need a RAID array for video editing, or something else ? fine, get a third HDD for the OS, and keep the RAID0 array seperate. Same goes for RAID1, or RAID5, keep it seperate from the OS, and if something catostrophic does happen, chances are, it wont be on the data disks(however, nothing is ever set in stone). I have been using this technique since the mid 90's, and have had very little problems, and have lost next to zero data, that I needed. Not only this, but it does help to organize your data, so it is more easily found later on, but not as important.
As for splitting OS/swap accross multiple drives, this is debatable. First, if all of your SATA channels are saturating what your system is capable of handeling, then no, but in theory it should help. I personally have noticed the bigest differences when transfering file locally, if I am transfering files from a PATA -> SATA drive, or vice versa. Two different interfaces, using two difference I/O channels.
</two cents>