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/
More details
Design
Good
Ease of use
Very easy
Instruction manual
Needs improvement
Manufacturer Support
Good
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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...
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