Verdict: The shape of Hitachi's things to come
After the excitement surrounding the arrival of a desktop hard disk space featuring perpendicular recording, in the shape of Seagate's mammoth 750GB drive, a 160GB hard disk looks like a mouse in comparison. However, this is no inconsequential rodent - the 7K160 is the beginning of a complete revamp of Hitachi's Deskstar range, a traditional CPC favourite. This particular model merely offers 80GB and 160GB versions, but it uses just a single platter to achieve this capacity. Hitachi is now able to squeeze 160GB of storage space onto a platter, which is bettered only by the 750GB version of Seagate's Barracuda 7200.10 and, as we've seen in the past, when it comes to disks, density equals performance.
Unlike Seagate's new 7200.10, however, the new Deskstar doesn't use perpendicular recording to boost capacity. Nevertheless, Hitachi usually has used some other 'special sauce' to make its drives outperform competitors with similar, or even better, paper specs. So we had high hopes for the 7K160, despite its run-of-the-mill 8MB cache and 7,200rpm spindle speed. Hitachi's latest 'special sauce' comprises a couple of new technologies called Thermal Fly Height Control and Iridium-Manganese-Chromium (IrMnCr) read sensors.
Thermal Fly Height Control is all about reacting to changes in temperature. Since the head itself changes shape according to the ambient temperature, a heating element can be used to control its size. This ensures that the head is a uniform distance from the disk surface at all times, which Hitachi claims improves write reliability by as much as 40 per cent. The IrMnCr technology benefits the read system, replacing the former platinum-manganese alloy used in previous read heads. The chromium (along with a ruthenium coating) merely forms a protective surface, preventing corrosion, but the iridium-manganese alloy is what makes the magnetic read much stronger. The end result is that reading is less susceptible to environmental factors, which allows for greater data densities.
We put the Hitachi through our suite of synthetic and real-world tests to see if the high areal density paid dividends. We used our previous graphics rig, the same PC with which we tested the Seagate last month, an Athlon 64 FX-57 with 2GB of RAM and an ASRock 939Dual-SATA2 motherboard. First, we ran HD Tach 3 RW on the unformatted drive. This reads and writes blocks of data across the entire surface of the disk, and also ascertains average access times and I/O throughput. The results were impressive, and on a par with the Seagate, which squeezes in more MB per platter and offers twice the cache. Although the Barracuda was marginally faster at reading on average, the 7K160 was significantly quicker at writing, indicating that Hitachi's Thermal Fly Height Control system works. As we've come to expect with Hitachi disks, the access time was also quicker than that of the Seagate.
This didn't translate to total domination in our real-world tests, however. The 7K160 was quick, but it couldn't beat Seagate's 750GB Barracuda 7200.10 in either the Paint Shop Pro image editing test or the Far Cry level load. The Paint Shop Pro score of 1.43 was 4 per cent slower than that of the Seagate, but 6 per cent faster than the rig's resident Hitachi Deskstar 7K250. It was 5 per cent slower than the Seagate loading Far Cry, at 52.5 seconds. However, the Barracuda has the 16MB cache advantage, and its gargantuan size means that the few gigabytes of test data will be located on the fastest portion of the disk, as we test a virgin drive.
CONCLUSION
A 160GB drive may be a little on the small side by current standards, so you might want to wait for the upcoming T7K500 range before sampling Hitachi's latest hard disk generation, as these will have bigger capacities as well as high-tech features that bring extra-high areal density.
However, if you're looking for a budget high-performance disk then the Deskstar 7K160 fits the bill nicely. It may be a mouse next to the elephantine 750GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 but, as everyone knows, elephants can sometimes be scared of mice.
