Hitachi GST Deskstar 7K3000 HDS723015BLA642 (0F12114) 1.5TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5″ Internal Hard Drive Bare Drive

Pros: Unbelievable!! I torture tested two of these babies over 3 1/2 days using Hard Disk Sentinel. I set up two iterations of a series of read and write tests, including seek, and write and read forward, reverse, and butterfly. The tests pounded both drives continuously for 3 1/2 days, writing 30 TB and reading 28 TB to/from each drive. (Yes, I mean terabytes.) Not one questionable sector. Temperature fluctuated between 38-40 degrees centigrade. Disk activity cannot be heard at all above fan noise from RAID enclosure 3 feet from my ears. (However, I am a bit hard of hearing.) I finally stopped the test suite about half-way into the second iteration of tests. This drive appears to be a well-kept secret. At 1.5 TB, it lies at the current sweet spot of data density in my opinion. 2+ TB may be pushing the technology and thus the reliability a bit. And $65? You must be kidding!

Cons: None so far…

Pros: I created a RAID6 array with 7 of these drives(+spare) and the performance is exceptional. The temps are cool and little or no noise. A great spinner!

ATTO Benchmark

Reads 1.65G/ps
Writes 1.42G/ps

Cons: One of the 8 drives was DOA. Not a show stopper. RMA’d.

Overall Review: RAID6 array built on the following controller:

HighPoint RocketRAID 3530 PCI-Express x8 SATA II (3.0Gb/s)

Windows 7 x64 Professional

Pros: Initially ordered 2 for RAID1 in new server build. Both work. Ordered 2 more for additional storage. Both work. Ordered 3 more for even more storage. All work. If I needed any more storage, I’d order more of these.

Cons: …usually live in prison.

Pros: Great drive, and noticably faster load times from my WD blue drive. This drive is getting good reliability reviews from the tech sites and is well made. It’s a design departure from earlier drives so you can’t really compare it to Deskstars of the past which I also thought were good, but not as well recieved as WD.

Cons: Not a Con on Hitachi but my Photoshop could not function with this drive at full size. I had to partition it beause the older versions of photoshop could not resolve the addressing for a swap file on such a large drive – this compatibility problem happens at sizes over 1TB with Photoshop and other programs.

Overall Review: Comes up frquently as a discounted item/promo. At the discount price, the Hitachi 1.5 TB Deskstar is the best bang for the buck by far.

Pros: The drives are extremely fast for 7200RPM, the 64MB cache really helps it read/write 100MB+, very quiet drives. Scores 343.2MB Burst, 114.9MB Avg. Seq. Read and 15.6ms Random Access in HD TACH. Please DO NOT USE Windows Experience Index and say there is no difference in performance, Microsoft has it’s own calculations on how the index is factored and doesn’t show any real world number to believe in.

Cons: Bought 3 Drives, had to RMA 1 drive which kinda sucks shipping cost vs cost of drive… oh well…1 point off for that, if the RMA is bad I’ll knock off another 2 points.

Overall Review: i7 2600K @ 4.6GHz (stock volts)
Corsair H60 water cooler
GIGABYTE GA-Z68X-UD3H-B3
CORSAIR Vengeance 8GB (2 x 4GB)
2 x SLI Galaxy 60XGH3HS3CUD GeForce GTX 465
ABS / Tagan BZ900 900W Power Supply
3 x HITACHI Deskstar 7K3000 1.5TB
IN WIN Dragon Rider Black 1.0 Full Tower
1st Montor SAMSUNG P2770FH ToC Rose Black 27″
2nd Monitor SAMSUNG LN37C550 ToC Rose Black 37″
SAMSUNG CD/DVD Burner SH-222AB

Pros: Fast, lots of storage, amazing price. No problems at all, easy install.

Cons: None whatsoever

Overall Review: I use this to store all my documents and apps and run windows from a SSD drive. Tried to run this drive as the primary drive, with the SSD as the cache using Intel Smart Response, but windows was much less snappy compared to using the SSD as a standalone drive.

I hugely recommend a standalone SSD as the OS drive and this drive as the bulk storage drive. I get Windows 7 loaded in under 15 seconds every time.

Pros: *$55 for 1.5TB 7200 rpm drive
* Runs a little cooler and about 20% faster than my WD Blue 640
*Great for storage
*Transfer Rate: Avg: 147 mb/s
*Burst Rate: 370-400 mb/s
*Access Time: Varies. HD Tune Pro: Avg: 15.8 ms. (Though short stroking yields 8.3 ms.) Hard Disk Sentinel: 10.7 ms avg with 8.6 ms min.

Cons: *Had to RMA the first drive sent. After two days sector error messages started and increased until it couldn’t pass the Hitachi Write 0 test and was declared defective.

*Interestingly, the first drive was packed better than the second that has worked fine for 3 weeks. The first with plastic enclosures in a box wrapped in paper. The second was wrapped loosely in a small piece of bubble wrap and placed in the bottom of a box with paper on top. The second method is specifically not approved by Hitachi for RMAs.

*64mb cache shows up at 32mb. Supposedly this is due to not using a SATA III cable.

Overall Review: NewEgg paid for RMA return shipping. It’s not their usual policy so I was surprised and pleased.

Pros: It’s quiet and a great value at 50ish dollars.

Cons: sata 6.0? Roughly ~250 (MB/s) means that this could barely saturate a 3.0. That’s the main complaint with all hard drives currently. No benefit in running this as a 6.0 as opposed to a 3.0 drive.

Overall Review: I’ve had great luck with Hitachi