Verdict: The once great DeskStar series is starting to look a bit long in the tooth
Hitachi has always liked high numbers. It was the first company to release a 400GB disk, and has just released a single drive containing a whole half-terabyte of storage space. However, as with the Deskstar 7K400 before it, the new 500GB 7K500 doesn't derive its huge capacity from a massive leap forward in aerial density. Instead, Hitachi has merely shoehorned five platters into a standard 3.5in hard disk case. At 100GB each, the platters themselves each offer a relatively modest capacity; they might have been state of the art this time last year, but with Samsung's awesome SpinPoint P120S offering 125GB per platter and the Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 having 133GB per platter, the 7K500 now looks to be a generation behind.
Still, 500MB is a massive amount of storage, and it isn't the only benefit the 7K500 offers. It's a S-ATA II disk with Native Command Queuing (NCQ) support. The cache is double that of previous versions, at 16MB. Although there's an EIDE version of the 7K500 available, you should note it only has an 8MB cache, and obviously no NCQ, as you'll only find this feature on S-ATA II disks.
On paper, the 7K500 isn't a very quiet drive, pumping out 31dBA even when idle. However, it wasn't particularly noisy during testing, although it wasn't as quiet as the P120S. We'd still recommend the latter if you're building a system intended for living room use, or if you just hate noise.
Those of you who follow the exciting world of EU directives will be absolutely thrilled to know that the 7K500 is RoHS-certified, so it complies with a recent directive on hazardous materials in electronics products, which prohibits the use of lots of lead, mercury, or even polybrominated diphenyl ethers, whatever they are.
While we'll miss those dangerous and difficult-to-spell chemicals, we were more concerned with putting the 7K500 through our benchmarks to see how fast it is.
We tested it using the same PC that we used for the P120S last month - an Athlon 64 FX-55 overclocked to 2.8GHz with an Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe motherboard. With its nForce4 SLI chipset, this motherboard offers full S-ATA II support, so it gave the 7K500 a chance to really show its potential.
Sadly, as the specifications predicted, the 7K500 just can't keep up with the P120S. The 7K500's average sustained throughput (recorded with Simpli Software's HD Tach RW 3) was a good 10MB/sec slower than that of the P120S, although the transfer rates from the inner and outer zones didn't lag quite so far behind. The average access time was a fairly average 13.3ms, only marginally faster than the P120S.
Overall, the picture from the synthetic benchmarks was, much like the convoluted wording of an EU directive, thoroughly uninspiring. Not surprisingly, these mediocre synthetic benchmark scores translated into lacklustre real-world results. In particular, the Far Cry level load was extremely slow. The 7K500 took 66 seconds - over 50 per cent slower than the P120S or Western Digital Caviar SE16, both of which completed the test in 40 seconds. This came as a bit of a surprise, as our experience with S-ATA II drives so far has been that NCQ and large drive caches can really speed up this test.
S-ATA II, NCQ and the 16MB of cache clearly benefited the 7K500 in our Paint Shop Pro image editing test, but not enough. In our new test, when hooked up to the 7K500, the test rig scored 1.57. In comparison, with the P120S installed, the same PC was nearly ten seconds faster, scoring 1.61.
CONCLUSION
The once great DeskStar series is starting to look a bit long in the tooth, and the 7K500 offers last year's performance. Like the EU parliament, not only is the 7K500 slow, but, at almost £270, it's also poor value for money. Considering that you can get two 250GB P120S disks for about £170, you'd have to be mad, or have a very strong need for 500GB in one disk to shell out for the 7K500. It may be big, but it's definitely not particularly clever.
