The Hitachi Deskstar 7K250 extends the company's long-standing tradition of performance leadership. This new series of Deskstar drives incorporates both new and proven technologies... more
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A review by r0sco1 on Hitachi DeskStar 7K250 120 GB March 8th, 2004
Author's product rating:
Memory / capacity
Good
Reliability
Excellent
Ease of Installation
Excellent - very quick and easy
Speed
Very fast
Value For Money
Excellent
Advantages:
Perfect
Disadvantages:
None
Recommend to potential buyers:
yes
Full review
Excellent Hard Drive. I used to have a Maxtor 40Gb hard drive and after getting broadband I realised I needed much more capacity.
I decided to go for an Hitachi/IBM Drive because I work in IT industry and I am particularly involved in mainframes and I am aware that Hitachi are extremely rigorous when it comes to releasing new drives, for a new type of drive to be released by Hitachi it has to survive in a mainframe environment. Hitachi has an extremely good reliability rate at mainframe level. Hitachi have used the latest technology to ensure that their drives maintain good reliability like a Head Load/Unload system which means that the drive will not wear itself out when not in operation.
In comparison to other 7200rpm drives the Deskstar come out on top in terms of its seek time, which allows faster access to data. It also includes an Internal Thermal Sensor for controllig the Temprature of the drive.
The Drive itself runs very quiet and Windows XP takes almost half the time to boot up as my previous drive. Also it runs lot cooler than my previous drive. Which means the sytem is far quieter than before on the whole because the system fan does not need to be cooler the system down anywhere near as much.
It launches applications far quicker than before and virus scans take only a fraction of the time the previous drive took.
I disagree with those who give Drives a bad review due to a hardware failure as it can happen to every drive, however such is the confidence of Hitachi/IBM mine came with a 2 year warranty.
Hitachi also have extra support on their website to help users get the best out of the drive, like drive opermisation software which using the Internal Thermal Sensor allows you to monitor the Drive Temparature.
The drive can be found on most retailers, such as Dabs, ebuyer, Scan etc, and they all tend to retail at £60 at the moment. However this product has almost the exact product description on these websites as the other 120Gb drive by Hitachi/IBM which only has a 2mb cache. Although this drive is slightly more expensive I would recommend it as it the long run the rewards will be far higher.
Seek Time: 8.5 ms (average) / 15.1 ms (max), 8.8 ms (average) / 15.1 ms (max)
Track-to-Track Seek Time: 1.1 ms
Average Latency: 4.17 ms
Spindle Speed: 7200 rpm
Reliability
Non-Recoverable Errors: 1 per 10^14
Start / Stop Cycles: 50,000
Expansion / connectivity
Interfaces: 1 x ATA-100 - 40 PIN IDC, 1 x Serial ATA-150 - 7 pin Serial ATA
Compatible Bays: 1 x internal - 3.5" x 1/3H
Manufacturer's product description
The Hitachi Deskstar 7K250 extends the company's long-standing tradition of performance leadership. This new series of Deskstar drives incorporates both new and proven technologies to boost the performance, capacity, and reliability to handle a wide range of advanced storage requirements. Hitachi's standardized features in desktop solutions enable fast transfer rates, low power utilization and quiet acoustics. These features combine to make the Deskstar 7K250 ideal not only for standard PC systems but also for ATA entry-servers, personal video recorders and other non-PC computing requirements.
Environmental parameters
Min Operating Temperature: 5 °C
Max Operating Temperature: 55 °C
Humidity Range Operating: 8 - 90%
Shock Tolerance: 55 g @ 2ms half-sine pulse (operating) / 300 g @ 2ms half-sine pulse (non-operating), 55 g @ 2ms half-sine pulse (operating) / 350 g @ 2ms half-sine pulse (non-operating)
Vibration Tolerance: 0.67 g @ RMS (random) (operating) / 1.04 g @ RMS (random) (non-operating)
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