Verdict: The new storage king, but only if you have a S-ATA II controller

Hitachi's Deskstars had the high ground in performance for some time, but over the last year, the competition has caught up, particularly in the field of data density. With the new T7K250, Hitachi hopes to regain its performance crown.

Although this is another 7,200rpm S-ATA drive with 8MB of cache, Hitachi has brought its areal density up to date. The 250GB model on test spreads its data over just two platters, for a density of 125GB each. Only the Seagate Barracudas offer more.

Despite the high areal density, the T7K250's performance initially turned out to be a mixed bag, and sustained throughput was only in the middle of the pack. However, like the 7K500, the drive defaults to S-ATA mode and you need to use Hitachi's Feature Tool applet to enable S-ATA II support. It's absolutely imperative you enable S-ATA II, though, if your motherboard supports it, as we found that S-ATA II had a dramatic effect on performance. The S-ATA Paint Shop Pro score of 1.52 increased to a much more respectable 1.56 with S-ATA II enabled. However, game level loading was the real winner. In S-ATA mode, the T7K250 was one of the slowest drives, but with S-ATA II and NCQ enabled, it was joint fastest along with the 7K500, and way ahead of the other drives.

So Hitachi does regain its crown, but only if you have a motherboard with S-ATA II support or a separate S-ATA II controller. If you're stuck with a S-ATA controller then the SpinPoint P120S is just as good.

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