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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Pirks - Thursday, April 19, 2007 - link
call it a waste after you lose a terabyte of data because you hdd died on ya, until then - move alongyyrkoon - Thursday, April 19, 2007 - link
BTW, those of us who are truely serious about their data, do not keep the data stored on HDD alone. Tape, offsite, optical, choose your poison.Pirks - Friday, April 20, 2007 - link
for me number one reason for data loss was ALWAYS hdd failure, those caviars that click to death. I've never experienced data loss for any other reason. hence my natural impulse is to put two hdds in mirror raid - this eliminates most potent threat. and striping only doubles it, plus striping only slows things down when you copy big files (video mux/demux and stuff like that) so for me its mirror only (plus extra drive to speed up file copies a LOT)yyrkoon - Thursday, April 19, 2007 - link
If you are smart about how you use your HDDs, you will have no need, BUT if it makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside, more power to you. The rest of us, who live in reality, and have HDDs much older than 10 years old, still functional, know better.Pirks - Friday, April 20, 2007 - link
yeah, I have 80 gig wd that I bought I forgot when, 5 years ago? maybe more... it's hot and noisy but looks like it's immortal. however, I wish ALL hdds were like this one. which they are not, unfortunately. those who experienced dead hdds (without doing anything special, just hdd that suddenly dies on you after a couple of years of excellent service) know better than youmlambert890 - Thursday, April 19, 2007 - link
it's not hundreds of dollars, its not insane, and you are wrong. its really kind of amusing that people are "debating" the basic premise of if a stripe set yields better read performance as if this were some new invention newly discovered and untested!Boushh - Thursday, April 19, 2007 - link
Well, maybe not hunderds of dollars (I agree that putting two of these 1 TB drive in RAID 0 is not very usefull) but if you go down the price list you can buy 2 320 Gb drives and put them in RAID 0. They are not expensive, and I know from my own experience that it realy makes a difference. All disk based activity is a lot faster than it would be on a single drive.I've may OS and my games on the RAID 0, and it realy helps speeding things up. So when the price is right RAID 0 is the way to speed up disk activity.
DigitalFreak - Thursday, April 19, 2007 - link
*sigh*mlambert890 - Thursday, April 19, 2007 - link
sigh all you want, but this is not up for debate. Many of us spend all day every day building and operating RAID systems. maybe for you, one article from anand that confirms some weird bias you have is sufficient. for those of us with 20+ years of doing this, the benefits of multiple spindles really dont need to be retested, and reproven, to make yet another generation feel cozy.synthetic benchmarks arent operating in some alternate reality. if whatever you are doing on your pc involves moving large, linear, blocks of data then you will benefit from a throughput boost clearly. in this case, a stripe set will yield quantitative benefit.
for many, loading something (even a game) seconds faster has value. esp since raid 0 has become a complete commodity. pointless article really, and pointless comments from the clueless. raid 0 has been written about and analyzed by smarter poeople with better measurement tools for decades. maybe people should try using common sense and broadening their google searches (that is if collecting their own real world experience is too much trouble)
OrSin - Thursday, April 19, 2007 - link
I got 20 years plus experience working in server farms and Raid is great from 0 to 5.With that said desktop raid dont do crap. I have over 10 systems in my house most on the extra same hardware. I tested Raid 0 and raid 5 and the difference in transfer speed even from GB switchs in less then 8%. Sorry but unless the maps or levels are just sitting in cache it don't do anything. Most of the delay is in seek time and Raid dont improve that at all. In fact I beleive it slows it (no proof). Please with all your experience the desktop and Server space is very different. Also remember SCSI raids improve seek time alot. I think if SATA hardware raids improve then raiding desktop might help.
PS
What are people doing they they even need a 50% improvement in hardrive speed on a desktop? Load levels and map? Sorry but saving even 5 secs out of 10, 5 times a day is not work the extra money to me. CPU, Ram, and Video cards scale so much better. You want the speed make a ram disk. :)