The Hitachi Deskstar T7K250 extends the company's long-standing tradition of performance leadership. Hitachi's standardized features in desktop solutions enable fast transfer... more
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and beyond. The T7K250 provides all of these enhancements to enable faster data access and better power management to the system. The drive is also backward compat...
A review by solaris1201 on Hitachi DeskStar T7K250 160 GB June 8th, 2006
Author's product rating:
Memory / capacity
Good
Reliability
Good
Ease of Installation
Excellent - very quick and easy
Speed
Fast
Value For Money
Excellent
Advantages:
Value for money, great performance, additional drive utilities , SATA 300Gb/s
Disadvantages:
Little noisy
Recommend to potential buyers:
yes
Full review
Product Description Hitachi DeskStar T7K250 - hard drive - 160 GB - SATA II Type Hard drive - internal Form Factor 3.5" x 1/3H Dimensions (WxDxH) 10.2 cm x 14.6 cm x 2.5 cm Weight 0.6 kg Capacity 160 GB Interface Type Serial ATA II Connector 22-position Serial ATA (SATA) plug Data Transfer Rate 300 MBps Average Seek Time 8.5 ms Spindle Speed 7200 rpm Buffer Size 8 MB
This is one of the cheapest SATA 300Gb/s capable hard disk available in this capacity range.
The hard disk has a SATA interface, regular 12v power connector, and also a SATA power interface. If your computer has the new SATA power connectors, you could use them. If not you can use the plain old regular 12v ATX power, which is available on any computer.
Out of the box, this drive is programmed to support only SATA 150Gb/s. You need to download a special utility from Hitachi website to enable SATA 300Gb/s. Their website is at http://www.hitachigst.com
With Windows XP 64bit version, I did a speed test which is available via the Device Manager and achieved 125 Gb/s burst rate. After I changed the drive to support SATA 300Gb/s, I was able to achieve 190Gb/s burst rate. Which is still lower than the theoretical 300Gb/s. I guess the drives are not still fast enough to take advantage of the huge bandwidth capacity of the SATA 300Gb/s interface.
The drive is exceptionally fast; thanks to 8mb buffer and 8.5 ms average seek time.
It is not that noisy, but it could have been made better I guess.
Please note that SATA II is not SATA 300Gb/s. SATA II is a new SATA technology which is still on the drawing board. Some people have confusingly used the wrong terminology to describe SATA 300Gb/s.
Link to Hitachi website http://www.hitachigst.com/portal/site/en/menuitem.8ad64ff886ef0714e85c1a70eac4f0a0/
Advantages: Fast, Sata, Quite Cheap, Reliable Disadvantages: Have to use Hitachi Software to Enable Sata II
...I chose this drive because Hitachi is a big brand and one that has a good reputation for reliability. I managed to pick up this drive for £44 inc. VAT which is a complete steal for a Hitachi drive.
If you buy the retail version you will get a 130 page instruction manual with every little detail about the drive in it as well as all the screws, cables etc but to be honest your much better off buying a OEM version which is identical but doesn't have ... ...speed you have to use Hitachi Feature Tools within windows, this is available from the Hitachi website and is easy enough but is just a added nuisance really. Once you have done this though the drive really flies along with speeds of about 130Mbps. The drive is also very unobtrusive sound wise, you can barely hear it clicking away in the background if you install it tightly. If your looking for something that's good for storing all of your files ...
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I used this to replae an aging maxtor 80GB that came with my computer. This hard drive is so much faster and quieter. Six months since installation and absolutely no problems.
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helpful
04.11.2007
Impressed Thus Far Review ofHitachi DeskStar T7K250 160 GBby
thisperson3785
Advantages: SATA so fast, smaller cables, easy to install Disadvantages: Can be loud when reading/writing
I wanted an SATA hard drive so bought this one on the back of great reviews with impressive test results when compared to comparative rival hard disks of similar price. I originally wanted an SATA 150 hard drive as that's all my motherboard can support, however this drive was marginally more expensive so I opted for this one, as, being SATA 2 it will be suitable for the future in a new PC. This drive performs far quicker than my old IDE hard drive ... ...diagnostic programs. As is made obvious from my earlier statement it is like most SATA 2 hard drives backwards compatible with SATA 150. There's not really too much more to say about a hard drive other than that it is quiet most of the time but makes the usual noises during read and write it is slightly louder than my old IDE drive but nothing extreme. Installation was easy and the new cabling system used by SATA is much better for system air flow.
...
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Seek Time: 8.5 ms (average) / 14.7 ms (max), 8.5 ms (average)
Track-to-Track Seek Time: 0.8 ms
Average Latency: 4.17 ms, 8.3 ms
Spindle Speed: 7200 rpm
Reliability
Non-Recoverable Errors: 1 per 10^14
Start / Stop Cycles: 50,000
Expansion / connectivity
Interfaces: 1 x Serial ATA-300 - 7 pin Serial ATA, 1 x ATA-133 - 40 PIN IDC
Compatible Bays: 1 x internal - 3.5" x 1/3H
Manufacturer's product description
The Hitachi Deskstar T7K250 extends the company's long-standing tradition of performance leadership. Hitachi's standardized features in desktop solutions enable fast transfer rates, low power utilization and quiet acoustics. These features combine to make the Deskstar T7K250 ideal not only for standard PC systems but also for ATA entry-servers, personal video recorders and other non-PC computing requirements. Hitachi is dedicated to provide a breadth of hard disk drive solutions to satisfy all of today's demanding computing needs.
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) / 350 g @ 2ms half-sine pulse (non-operating)
Vibration Tolerance: 0.67 g @ RMS (random) (operating) / 1.04 g @ RMS (random) (non-operating), 0.56 g @ RMS (random) (operating) / 1.04 g @ RMS (random) (non-operating)
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