Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000: Terabyte Storage arrives on the Desktop
by Gary Key on March 19, 2007 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Hard Drive Performance: Acoustics
Our acoustic test utilizes our standard test bed components but we implement AMD's Cool'n'Quiet technology and turn off the case fans to isolate as much case noise as possible during testing. Our OCZ power supply is nearly silent in these tests and our fanless ASUS 7600GS video card provides a further decrease in our case's ambient noise levels. Our drives are attached to the drive cage with rubber bushings to assist in isolating the noise of the drive without resulting harmonic changes due to the case design
Our acoustic tests are designed to measure the decibel levels while the system is at idle and also under load while running the General Hard Disk Drive Usage benchmark within PCMark 2005. We found through trail and error that this particular benchmark produces controlled readings across a wide range of applications within the benchmark. This particular benchmark utilizes 60% reads and 40% writes within the trace playback file.
The measurements are taken at a distance of 5 millimeters from the rear and front of the drive being tested in order to minimize surrounding environmental noise. We take our measurements over a period of twenty minutes, so idle measurements will include operating system interrupt and polling routines. We have noticed that unless we run a silent system in a near silent room that measurements taken from 1 meter are generally not meaningful due to ambient noise levels. There are exceptions like the Raptor series of drives but overall most modern desktop drives are quieter now than the other components in the system.
The reported measurements are based on an A-weighted decibel score that measures frequencies similar to the way the human ear responds to sound. We take a total of three measurements for each test. We then subtract the high and low scores and arrive at our findings by reporting the remaining score.
Our Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 is the quietest drive that we have ever tested. We basically could not hear the drive and at times wondered if it was operating with AAM turned on. Even with AAM turned off, the drive was extremely quiet at idle and under load where it still scored better than our other test units. Our subjective opinion with AAM turned off is that the seek requests are muted greatly but still noticeable when compared to the other drives. The only other significant audible noise is a slight whirling sound as the drive spins up on a cold start or after a reboot. We just cannot emphasize enough how quiet this drive is in our test configuration with AAM enabled at the 128 setting. We even removed the rubber mounting grommets in our drive cage and did not notice any differences in acoustics or vibration levels. Our base dB(A) level in the room at time of testing was 25 dB(A).
Hard Drive Performance: Thermals
Our thermal tests utilize sensor readings via the S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) capability of the drives and are reported by utilizing the Active SMART 2.42 utility. We test our drives in an enclosed case environment without the front fan operational to simulate temperatures that could conceivably be reached in a SFF or HTPC case design. We typically find the reported numbers drop anywhere from 18% to 25% on average when the front fan is operational.
We typically let the drive idle for fifteen minutes before starting our idle thermal testing. Our load testing consists of taking the high temperature reading after looping the PCMark 2005 HD Suite benchmark five times. We also check load temps after looping our Nero Recode encoding test three times.
We expected the 7K1000 to run as warm as the Seagate 750GB due to the five platter design. However, under both idle and load conditions it operated significantly cooler than Seagate's large capacity PMR design. We have additional power and thermal management tests to run but at this time we were pleasantly surprised with the results. The load temperatures dropped from 51C to 43C and idle temps dropped from 35C to 31C with our front case fan operational. We highly recommend a fan be installed near the drive during normal operation. Our test room temperatures were 24C during these tests.
Our acoustic test utilizes our standard test bed components but we implement AMD's Cool'n'Quiet technology and turn off the case fans to isolate as much case noise as possible during testing. Our OCZ power supply is nearly silent in these tests and our fanless ASUS 7600GS video card provides a further decrease in our case's ambient noise levels. Our drives are attached to the drive cage with rubber bushings to assist in isolating the noise of the drive without resulting harmonic changes due to the case design
Our acoustic tests are designed to measure the decibel levels while the system is at idle and also under load while running the General Hard Disk Drive Usage benchmark within PCMark 2005. We found through trail and error that this particular benchmark produces controlled readings across a wide range of applications within the benchmark. This particular benchmark utilizes 60% reads and 40% writes within the trace playback file.
The measurements are taken at a distance of 5 millimeters from the rear and front of the drive being tested in order to minimize surrounding environmental noise. We take our measurements over a period of twenty minutes, so idle measurements will include operating system interrupt and polling routines. We have noticed that unless we run a silent system in a near silent room that measurements taken from 1 meter are generally not meaningful due to ambient noise levels. There are exceptions like the Raptor series of drives but overall most modern desktop drives are quieter now than the other components in the system.
The reported measurements are based on an A-weighted decibel score that measures frequencies similar to the way the human ear responds to sound. We take a total of three measurements for each test. We then subtract the high and low scores and arrive at our findings by reporting the remaining score.
Our Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 is the quietest drive that we have ever tested. We basically could not hear the drive and at times wondered if it was operating with AAM turned on. Even with AAM turned off, the drive was extremely quiet at idle and under load where it still scored better than our other test units. Our subjective opinion with AAM turned off is that the seek requests are muted greatly but still noticeable when compared to the other drives. The only other significant audible noise is a slight whirling sound as the drive spins up on a cold start or after a reboot. We just cannot emphasize enough how quiet this drive is in our test configuration with AAM enabled at the 128 setting. We even removed the rubber mounting grommets in our drive cage and did not notice any differences in acoustics or vibration levels. Our base dB(A) level in the room at time of testing was 25 dB(A).
Hard Drive Performance: Thermals
Our thermal tests utilize sensor readings via the S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) capability of the drives and are reported by utilizing the Active SMART 2.42 utility. We test our drives in an enclosed case environment without the front fan operational to simulate temperatures that could conceivably be reached in a SFF or HTPC case design. We typically find the reported numbers drop anywhere from 18% to 25% on average when the front fan is operational.
We typically let the drive idle for fifteen minutes before starting our idle thermal testing. Our load testing consists of taking the high temperature reading after looping the PCMark 2005 HD Suite benchmark five times. We also check load temps after looping our Nero Recode encoding test three times.
We expected the 7K1000 to run as warm as the Seagate 750GB due to the five platter design. However, under both idle and load conditions it operated significantly cooler than Seagate's large capacity PMR design. We have additional power and thermal management tests to run but at this time we were pleasantly surprised with the results. The load temperatures dropped from 51C to 43C and idle temps dropped from 35C to 31C with our front case fan operational. We highly recommend a fan be installed near the drive during normal operation. Our test room temperatures were 24C during these tests.
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goldfish2 - Tuesday, March 20, 2007 - link
just noticed a problem you may wish to address with your charts, hope this hasn't already been mentioned.Take a look at the chart 'video application timing - time to transcode DVD'
Your times are in Minutes/seconds, it seems you're chart application has interpreted the numbers as decimals, and made the bar lengths on this basis. Take a look at the bar for WD5000YS 500GB. It says 4.59; I assume this means 4 minutes 59 seconds, making the WD740GD 2 seconds slower at 5 minutes 1 second. But the bar lengths are scaled for decimal, so that the bar on the WD740GD is much longer. You'll have to see if you can get your graph package to think in minutes:seconds, or have the bar lengths entered in decimal (i.e. 4:30 seconds becomes 4.5 minutes) and put a label on in minutes for readability.
Thanks for the review though.
Gary Key - Tuesday, March 20, 2007 - link
We have a short blurb under the Application Performance section -"Our application benchmarks are designed to show application performance results with times being reported in minutes / seconds or seconds only, with lower scores being better. Our graph engine does not allow for a time format such a 1:05 (one minute, five seconds) so this time value will be represented as 1.05."
We know this is an issue and hopefully we can address it in our next engine update (coming soon from what I understand). I had used percentage values in a previous article that was also confusing to some degree. Thanks for the comments and they have been passed on to our web team. ;)
PrinceGaz - Tuesday, March 20, 2007 - link
The simplest and most logical solution is just to enter the time in seconds, rather than minutes and seconds; even if graphed correctly, comparing values composed of two units (minutes:seconds) is difficult compared to a single unit (seconds).If two results were 6:47 and 7:04 for instance, the difference betweem them is much clearer if you say 407 and 424 seconds. By giving the value in seconds only, you can see at a glance that there is a 17 second difference, which translates to just over 4% (17 divided by 407/100, or 17 divided by about 4.1).
Doing the same mental calculation with 6:47 and 7:04 first involves working out the difference with the extra step of dealing with 60 seconds to a minute. Then you have a difference of 17 seconds out of a little under 7 minutes, which isn't very helpful until you convert the 7 minutes to seconds, as it should have been originally.
That's my opinion anyway.
JarredWalton - Tuesday, March 20, 2007 - link
Hi Gary. I told you so! Damned if you do, damned if you don't. ;) (The rest of you can just ignore me.)PrinceGaz - Tuesday, March 20, 2007 - link
How can you say only two years?
The 14 years you say it took to increase from 1GB to 500GB represents a doubling of capacity nine times, or roughly 1.56 years (19 months) for the capacity to double. That means that the two years (actually 20 months as Hitachi released a 500GB drive in Jul 2005) it took to double again, from 500GB to 1TB is actually marginally longer than average.
It would be more accurate to say that the trend of capacities doubling roughly every 18 months is continuing.
patentman - Tuesday, March 20, 2007 - link
The two year remark is two years from the first commercial perpendicular recording drive. Perpendicular recording has been in the works for a long time. In fact, when I used to examine patent applications for a living, there was patent literature related to perpendicular recording all the way back in 1990-1991, albeit for relatively simple aspects of the device.Gary Key - Tuesday, March 20, 2007 - link
The averaging of the time periods does work out to a doubling of capacities every 18~20 months but the last doubling took about 26 months to go from 250GB to 500GB.
mino - Wednesday, March 21, 2007 - link
Yes, but first 250GB drives were 4-platter 5400rpm ones(Maxtor?)...First 500GB were 5-platter 7200rpm ones.
IMO there are little dicrepancies in the tren dcaused bu the worry of many-platter drives after 75GXP. Aftre a few years Hitachi came back with 7K400 and the curve just returned to values it lost before...
scott967 - Tuesday, March 20, 2007 - link
On these big drives is NTFS performance an issue at all?scott s.
.
AbRASiON - Monday, March 19, 2007 - link
Too slow, too much money, too little space.I've owned 3 and sold them.
When are we going to see a 15krpm Savvio 2.5" review?
When will we see a 180gb per platter 32mb 10,000rpm new series raptor?
Maybe WD should also make a 15krpm 2.5" - 32mb model
These incrimental speed upgrades on hard disks are terrible :( need more, much much more.