- Aug 14, 2000
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Background
My Caviar Black has been an outstanding drive but it’s also getting a little old; I got it in 2008. Western Digital has been stuck with 500 GB platters for ages in their Black line, while their competitors are using 1 TB platters in their flagship drives.
I won’t touch Seagate, so that left Hitachi. I got the 7K1000.D - a single platter 1 TB drive - on the basis that its’ much higher areal density should give a good performance gain.
Testing Methods
All drives were tested with a single partition with all of my games copied to it. Windows 7 (64 bit) was running off another drive. The drives were also defragmented before use, and the system was rebooted after testing a particular drive to eliminate disk caching.
As it uses the advanced format, the Hitachi drive was verified to have correct 512e alignment with the utility available on their website.
System
The system specs are below in my sig, and the three drives tested are:
The Hitachi posts scorching sequential scores but its random access time is very poor compared to WD’s drives. The Black manages higher sequential scores AND lower access times than the SE16, so there’s no reason why both can’t improve in a drive.
Games
Here are some level load times from an assortment of games. This is pretty much the only scenario where storage regularly bottlenecks me to any meaningful degree, so I wanted to see how these drives coped in the real world. I used a stop-watch to time these, so allow 1 second for margin of error.
The Black is faster than the SE16 across the board, except in Thief 3. While some of the gains aren’t huge, the drive is still consistently faster, so it was a justified upgrade over the SE16 back in 2008.
The Hitachi doesn’t fare quite so well compared to the Black, which was the whole point of this upgrade. In three games it’s much faster (Crysis 1, Quake 1, Stalker 3), but for the other 7 games it’s either the same speed or slower.
Keep in mind that the Black was released in 2008 while the Hitachi came out in 2011, and achieved the same capacity with just one platter instead of three. With such a huge advantage in areal density, I’d wager the poor random access time is hampering Hitachi’s performance.
Subjective Usage
When used solely as a storage drive and doing multi-GB data transfers (e.g. my ~450 GB backup of assorted files), the Hitachi is fast at both reading and writing. But when used for Windows and applications like iTunes at the same time, it feels slightly sluggish compared to the Black and even the SE16.
As for noise, both WD drives have a constant audible whine at idle, with the SE16 having excessive vibration. But the Hitachi’s so quiet I can’t even hear it unless I put my ear right next to my case.
When seeking the Black has a rumbling noise (which is more subdued on the SE16). Meanwhile the Hitachi has a slight clicking sound at worst, kind of like an HDD iPod that’s seeking.
I’m absolutely amazed at the acoustic difference between the two companies, and the Hitachi drive could easily belong inside any silent computing system.
What’s next?
The Hitachi is a fine drive but it fails to convincingly beat my four year old Caviar Black for my performance needs. I now believe the 2 x 500 GB platter Western Digital 1 TB WD1002FAEX will be a more suitable drive for me, so I’ve ordered one to test. I’ll decide which drive to send back based on the results.
I’ll update post #2 of this thread when I have results from the fourth drive.
My Caviar Black has been an outstanding drive but it’s also getting a little old; I got it in 2008. Western Digital has been stuck with 500 GB platters for ages in their Black line, while their competitors are using 1 TB platters in their flagship drives.
I won’t touch Seagate, so that left Hitachi. I got the 7K1000.D - a single platter 1 TB drive - on the basis that its’ much higher areal density should give a good performance gain.
Testing Methods
All drives were tested with a single partition with all of my games copied to it. Windows 7 (64 bit) was running off another drive. The drives were also defragmented before use, and the system was rebooted after testing a particular drive to eliminate disk caching.
As it uses the advanced format, the Hitachi drive was verified to have correct 512e alignment with the utility available on their website.
System
The system specs are below in my sig, and the three drives tested are:
- Western Digital Caviar SE16 750 GB (WD7500AAKS-00RBA0), 4 x 188 GB platters.
- Western Digital Caviar Black 1 TB (WD1001FALS-00J7B0) , 3 x 333 GB platters.
- Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.D 1 TB (HDS721010DLE630), 1 x 1000 GB platters.
The Hitachi posts scorching sequential scores but its random access time is very poor compared to WD’s drives. The Black manages higher sequential scores AND lower access times than the SE16, so there’s no reason why both can’t improve in a drive.
Games
Here are some level load times from an assortment of games. This is pretty much the only scenario where storage regularly bottlenecks me to any meaningful degree, so I wanted to see how these drives coped in the real world. I used a stop-watch to time these, so allow 1 second for margin of error.
The Black is faster than the SE16 across the board, except in Thief 3. While some of the gains aren’t huge, the drive is still consistently faster, so it was a justified upgrade over the SE16 back in 2008.
The Hitachi doesn’t fare quite so well compared to the Black, which was the whole point of this upgrade. In three games it’s much faster (Crysis 1, Quake 1, Stalker 3), but for the other 7 games it’s either the same speed or slower.
Keep in mind that the Black was released in 2008 while the Hitachi came out in 2011, and achieved the same capacity with just one platter instead of three. With such a huge advantage in areal density, I’d wager the poor random access time is hampering Hitachi’s performance.
Subjective Usage
When used solely as a storage drive and doing multi-GB data transfers (e.g. my ~450 GB backup of assorted files), the Hitachi is fast at both reading and writing. But when used for Windows and applications like iTunes at the same time, it feels slightly sluggish compared to the Black and even the SE16.
As for noise, both WD drives have a constant audible whine at idle, with the SE16 having excessive vibration. But the Hitachi’s so quiet I can’t even hear it unless I put my ear right next to my case.
When seeking the Black has a rumbling noise (which is more subdued on the SE16). Meanwhile the Hitachi has a slight clicking sound at worst, kind of like an HDD iPod that’s seeking.
I’m absolutely amazed at the acoustic difference between the two companies, and the Hitachi drive could easily belong inside any silent computing system.
What’s next?
The Hitachi is a fine drive but it fails to convincingly beat my four year old Caviar Black for my performance needs. I now believe the 2 x 500 GB platter Western Digital 1 TB WD1002FAEX will be a more suitable drive for me, so I’ve ordered one to test. I’ll decide which drive to send back based on the results.
I’ll update post #2 of this thread when I have results from the fourth drive.
Last edited:
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