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.
More details
Design
Good
Ease of use
Very easy
Instruction manual
Good
Manufacturer Support
Excellent
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