Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000 - Massive 'n Speedy

Ever since the 2TB capacity limit was breached, there have been a large number of 3TB drives that have entered the market. We already tested a few of these – the Seagate Barracuda XT 3TB and WD’s Caviar Green 3TB. The new drives don’t offer the best value for money if you’re looking for that, but we’ve seen some pretty impressive performances coming from them. Hitachi, a brand that’s not very popular in the Indian desktop hard drive market has launched a 3 TB drive – the Deskstar 7K3000.

The high performing Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000

Design and Features

The design of the drive is pretty identical to almost any other desktop drive. The upper panel of the drive if at all looks slightly different but that does not really concern a desktop user. The Deskstar 7K3000, like the Seagate Barracuda XT runs at 7200 rpm and has an internal cache of 64MB. It has a 512 byte sector size and is a SATA3 compliant drive.

Massive capacity with this 3TB hard drive

Performance

The performance of the drive is hard to judge due to its somewhat inconsistent performance. On one hand, its sequential write speeds are a tiny bit faster than the Seagate Barracuda. Our 4GB file copy test recorded a speed of 110MB/s as compared to the Barracuda’s 107.39MB/s. Assorted data in the form of a 4 GB folder saw speeds drop to 81.9 MB/s which is still pretty reasonable but nowhere close to the Barracuda’s 95.27MB/s. We’re pretty impressed with the write speeds of the drive.

Data copy tests within the hard drive are obviously much slower. We saw speeds of 52.51MB/s with our 4GB sequential data and 49.34MB/s with the assorted data set.

Reads speeds are generally a bit faster than the write speeds. In this case, the drive has identical read speeds with the sequential data. Once again, we saw speeds peaking at 110MB/s. Assorted data read speeds saw an increase with the speeds touching 89.04MB/s. Overall, the speeds we noticed were pretty impressive.

6 GB/s SATA interface

Verdict

The Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000 is a pretty solid performer. It beat the WD Caviar Green easily, but they’re two different types of the drives. It easily matches the Seagate Barracuda across many tests. The final verdict however, depends on how well the drive is priced. The MRP for the Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000 is hefty Rs. 16,000, a whole Rs. 1,100 more than the Seagate Barracuda XT 3TB. While the two drives are neck to neck in most tests, the Barracuda XT has a slight lead in the write speeds. If you go just by the MRP, you’re better off with the Seagate. However, if you can find the Deskstar for lot less than Rs. 13,700, it might be a good buy. It has to be said that both these drives with their massive capacities are pretty impressive performers and quite honestly, you’d be just fine if you chose either one, if they priced identically.