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.
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48 Comments
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photoguy99 - Thursday, April 19, 2007 - link
You have tested XP 32-bit which uses the "ScsiPort" storage system.This artificially limits results using Raid.
Vista 32, Vista x64, and XP x64 all use the "StorPort" storage system, which is much faster and doesn't limit Raid results.
You could add 4 or 8 drives in Raid 0 and your transfer rates would not change much.
This should really be part of the discussion for the article.
yyrkoon - Thursday, April 19, 2007 - link
Funny that, last time I personally did a dirrect comparrison of a 3xRAID0 array in Vista, it was 30-40MB/s slower comparred to the same array in XP Pro.Nothing changed, only the OS.
photoguy99 - Thursday, April 19, 2007 - link
Perhaps in your case the Vista driver was not as optimized as the XP driver or was not using storport.However, it is absolutely invalid to benchmark raid performance on XP 32-bit if your goal is to test hardware rather than OS specific results.
Microsoft reference:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms803198....">http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms803198....
AllanLim - Thursday, April 19, 2007 - link
http://kakaku.com/item/05300415786/">http://kakaku.com/item/05300415786/Along with every other pc component, this probably comes at 20-30% premium compared to Stateside when it becomes available, but at least you can but it here.
Myrandex - Thursday, April 19, 2007 - link
Two 250GB drives in Raid 0. I dunno, I still feel that it helps with some load times on large maps on games and large numbers of file transfers at once, but I could be full of it. I do keep an off disk backup though that is pretty current.Jason
Sunrise089 - Thursday, April 19, 2007 - link
Sorry to double-post, but the end of the article says:" As stated in both articles, we believe leaving AAM and NCQ turned provides the best user experience with this drive."
I think there should be an "on" or "off" after "turned".
Sunrise089 - Thursday, April 19, 2007 - link
I have a long-running arguement with another PC enthusiest about the relative merit of RAID 0. Some people just cannot get it through their heads that no matter how great the idea sounds, the performance just isn't justified by the cost. At all. With video card price/performance scaling perfectly, and CPU and memory scaling at least OK, it's insane to spend hundreds of dollars on a second hard drive and gain a few percentage points in real-world tests. Thanks Anandtech for keeping the real-world focus of these articles.mesyn191 - Saturday, April 21, 2007 - link
Depends how its done...These software RAID controllers (yes NVRAID, Intel Matrix RAID, Silicon Image 3112/4 etc, Promise, Highpoint are all software RAID controllers that often act more like storage subsystem DE-celerators and often slow things down...) that Anandtech keeps using to demonstrate the pointlessness of RAID 0 really only prove how crappy software RAID controllers are. If you use a "real" enterprise class RAID controller that has a dedicated CPU and significant cache you'll see some real world performance improvements, even with doing things like loading games which is a far from ideal work load for RAID 0. The problem is most of these "real" RAID controllers tend to cost ~$300, and that is for a cheap one, high end versions can easily cost thousands of dollars and most people don't want to spend that much on storage. Most of these enterprise class controllers also tend to have issues working with desktop motherboards, they're really meant for use in server motherboards and so they won't even boot up properly in alot of them, just read up on all the issues people tend to have getting the Areca 1210 (probably the most commonly used enterprise class RAID card in the enthusiast PC crowd) PCIe RAID cards working in commodity consumer grade motherboards.
Of course another nice thing about those enterprise class RAID controllers is most of them support multiple levels of RAID at the same time, so you can have a RAID 0 set and a RAID 5 set on the same bunch of hard drives, providing you a good way to safe guard your data and get a performance benefit.
PenGun - Friday, April 20, 2007 - link
K .... maybe you can tell me how I'm gonna get a solid write of 150MB/sec any other way. My camera in HD SDI needs to move that much data.RAID 0 or perhaps RAID 5 (to be tested soon) is the only way. 4 Western Digital 500G drives is my way of handling that fire hose of data.
Oh go back to your games it really does not matter, it's just my problem right now. It is my desktop when it's full. It's easier to crunch the massive files in situ.
yyrkoon - Thursday, April 19, 2007 - link
Some people just can not seem to get it through their heads, that not everyone plays games, or surfs the web, on a home desktop PC. Video editing applications that require 65MB/s substained transfers rates, will require either a very fast disk, or two lesser drives striped.
Since most enterprise drives cost an arm and a leg, I think running RAID0 for this application, or something that NEEDS the throughput justifies the cost. Now, I personally DO run RAID0 on my home desktop, and I think it is more than justified, but I do not expect it to work wonders, and I definately know, it will not make my system boot faster, will not make a First Person Shooter faster (except, perhaps level load times, which is pretty much moot).
Now, Imagine spending 2x $400 for RAID1 . . . that is what I call a waste of money, although, with these hitachi drives, who knows how reliable they are. The point here, being, you can not tell anyone what they need, or want in a desktop, because you really have not a clue what they really need / want. This being said, RAID0 for most people probably is overkill.