Hitachi SATA II - 250 Gig Hard Drive Review, Including RAID tests

Hey Guys,

Solo, aka Sheik has done a review on Hitachi's relatively new SATA II capable HDT722525DLA380 250GB hard drives.

Link

As posted on Tweaktown Frontpage

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However, it doesnt just stop there peeps, he's got four of these buggers to play with, and what better way to impress than to whack 'em into a RAID 0 array on a SATA II equipped nForce4 platform and push out some INSANE benchmarking results (328MB/s burst anyone?). I warn you in advance though, reading this may very well entice you to spend lots of money!

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I have one of these drive here, can't afford more, but they will come. :D

4 in Raid0 beats Raptors in the same raid config.

Cheers All,
Jason

No one interested? :(

Holy crap, SATA II looks promising :)

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Three Drives in RAID 0 :banana:
http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y10...ID0_Sandra.jpg
http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y10...ng_RAID0_3.jpg

Well, well. According to Sandra 2005, 3 Hitachi SATA 300’s are just ahead of 4 x 10000 RPM Raptors! Very nice.

Check out 4 HardDrive in RAID0! Dam, Some Awesome Speeds there :banana:

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L I N K ! :banana:

dam fast!

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Originally Posted by eva2000

dam fast!

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Beats the pants of the Raptors and way cheaper per gig

359MB/s Burst Speed!!

PCMark04 (HHD Score – 8842)

check IT

http://www.net-forums.net/forums/Hit...ew-t21127.html :banana:

Have any other brands released SataII drives?

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Originally Posted by Mehmet_Ali

Have any other brands released SataII drives?

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Only other one I know of currently is the Maxtor DiamondMax 10 SATA II 300GB.

Yow Jason :D

Yeh it was fun.

Have been looking at those drives. Very affordable and fast. I saw Seagate sataII at mwave.

Wow, makes me want to sell my Raptor and pick one up. I actually might do that, but do they make those in smaller sizes?

You get an 80 GIG and 160 GIG but according to Hitachi they dont perform anywhere as well as the 250 GIG ie fewer platters.

I'd be interested if the speed wasn't attached to huge 300Gb drives!

Give me 4x36Gb SATAII drives which run at 10K, my mass storage is handled elsewhere. All I want is to run windows, apps and have workspace on the RAID0 array :D

I've been running this Hitachi SATA II for over a week now as my main drive and I can honestly say there is a noticable increase in daily tasks. From bootup to app loading and file copy. Definitely a good investment if you have a SATA 300 compatible mobo.

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Originally Posted by Sheik

I've been running this Hitachi SATA II for over a week now as my main drive and I can honestly say there is a noticable increase in daily tasks. From bootup to app loading and file copy. Definitely a good investment if you have a SATA 300 compatible mobo.

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I second that! :banana: :banana: Thanks SOLO for organising it :toast:

No problemo. :toast:

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Originally Posted by Sheik

You get an 80 GIG and 160 GIG but according to Hitachi they dont perform anywhere as well as the 250 GIG ie fewer platters.

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Awesome article - thanks a lot!
Could you give me some more info on that one? I was looking into buying on the 160GB drives - but if they are slower - I'd be bummed. They run around $95 which would be a decent price...

These HDD's look promising as hell. Give me an additional 8MB cache and I'm sold (BTW, Hitachi is the only company who sells true SATAII 300MB's HDD's, the Maxtor's and Seagate's are 150MB's only).

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Originally Posted by mikeguava

Awesome article - thanks a lot!
Could you give me some more info on that one? I was looking into buying on the 160GB drives - but if they are slower - I'd be bummed. They run around $95 which would be a decent price...

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Thanks.

I haven't tried the 160 GIG drives so I would be lying if I said they were slower. I'm just quoting what someone from Hitachi told me.

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Originally Posted by Hombre

(BTW, Hitachi is the only company who sells true SATAII 300MB's HDD's, the Maxtor's and Seagate's are 150MB's only).

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Erm, how about Samsung? :p

Hi!

I am new here but have been reading posts on this forum for a very long time. I just ordered one 250Gb T7k250 Sata and I will get it at the end of the week. Hitachi has done a very good job with their drives :toast: . Before I was a Maxtor fan but after the 7k250 series I went over to Hitachi and now it seems I will keep going Hitachi :D .

I ordered 4 Hitachi's SATA-II of 80Gb, cost about 3€ more then the SATA-I
let's put these babies in raid and wait for some nice results :woot:

Sup y'all,

A quick off topic question. I've got got 2 raid setups as shown in my sig. I can't share any files on my network on any of the two setups. Only shares on the maxtor IDE drive can be accessed by other ppl. Any ideas what could be wrong? :confused:

weird - you sure you have sharing enabled for the drives?

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Originally Posted by Sheik

I've been running this Hitachi SATA II for over a week now as my main drive and I can honestly say there is a noticable increase in daily tasks. From bootup to app loading and file copy. Definitely a good investment if you have a SATA 300 compatible mobo.

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Sheik - how would you think the Sata II 4 drives stripe would hold up against a UW320 15,000RPM 4 drive stripe set?

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Originally Posted by Funny_S

I ordered 4 Hitachi's SATA-II of 80Gb, cost about 3€ more then the SATA-I
let's put these babies in raid and wait for some nice results :woot:

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Funny-S - can't wait to see what you'lll get out of them - you mind to bench 'em properly? ABout to order some drives myself - now that Western Digital came out today with some more Sata II drives there are even more choices....

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Originally Posted by mikeguava

weird - you sure you have sharing enabled for the drives?

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Yeah, i've double checked the security settings and the user access levels are all the same for the folders on the Maxtor IDE as on the RAID drives, but nothing works.

What is even more weird is that i'm running a website on the Raptor RAID setup and everyone can view the entire site (the pictures seem to have a few issues showing every now and then tho). But i can't even share actual files such as movies or executables other than on the site.

I jus don't get it :confused:

"Sheik - how would you think the Sata II 4 drives stripe would hold up against a UW320 15,000RPM 4 drive stripe set?"

NOt sure but you get much more space and its a lot cheaper to get a couple of 250 GIG SATA 300's

PS I see Western Digital have just anounced their SATA II drives with 16 MB cache !

Yes - they should also be nice! They supposed to be shipping now - but no online retailer has either the 250Gb Hitachi nor the WD Sata II...hopefully soon

sweet!

will the drive work if i hoocked it to my asus p4c800-e. it doesn't support sataII.

Yes it should. It ships setup as a normal SATA 150 drive. You have to manually enable SATA 300 by changing the firmware (from floppy using Hitachi Feature Tool).

Hopefully they will find a way to change this with a jumper in future. Having to pull out my floppy drive after about 5 years kind of sucked :rolleyes:

do any of you guys know if the non SLI DFI nforce4 board can use the features provided by these hards drives (e.g. Sata II,ncq,etc.)

Any word on gen 3 Raptors with SATAII and possibly 16meg caches? (or maybe even 15k rpm?!)

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Originally Posted by Playful_Buffalo

do any of you guys know if the non SLI DFI nforce4 board can use the features provided by these hards drives (e.g. Sata II,ncq,etc.)

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The Ultra yes. The Vanilla NF4 no.

http://www.nvidia.com/page/nforce4_family.html

so my ULTRA-D has SATA2 support ? :)

will i manage to get RAID from

SATA 1 hitachi 160gb + SATA 2 hitachi 160gb.....so damn hard to find HITACHI SATA 160GB :(

imagine 2 of these SATA 2 in RAID :woot:

So the Western Digital drives are now shipping - 16mb sounds nice - but the do not have native command queuing. As a guess would you guys think the Hitachi with NCQ and 8MB cache or the WD with 16mb cache and no NCQ would be faster?

techreports.com review of the Hitachi T7k250 wasn't too good for the drives in single mode...
http://techreport.com/reviews/2005q2...0/index.x?pg=1

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Originally Posted by mikeguava

So the Western Digital drives are now shipping - 16mb sounds nice - but the do not have native command queuing. As a guess would you guys think the Hitachi with NCQ and 8MB cache or the WD with 16mb cache and no NCQ would be faster?

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There is no real world performance gain from using NCQ so the WD with 16MB cache.

Umm... actually it does create a fairly big performance increase in multitasking environments... Read the Anandtech articles.

I'd recommend the Maxline III, it has NCQ and a 16MB buffer but not full SATA2/300 support.

OMG, did you saw the upcoming WD 250GB? 16Megabytes of cache, SATAII 300MB/s, NCQ... Seems like a perfect HDD!

Has anyone found a comparison of all these next generation drives?

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Originally Posted by Hombre

OMG, did you saw the upcoming WD 250GB? 16Megabytes of cache, SATAII 300MB/s, NCQ... Seems like a perfect HDD!

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NCQ ?

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TO A CLASHING OF cymbals, Western Digital released S-ATA II specs and the advantages of II over one at the Three E conference in LA LA land the other week.

But, according to system integrators briefed by WD and who told us how the HDD firm tried to spin things, it's not really good enough to position S-ATA II as a consumer answer for people wanting Windows based gaming PCs.

WD splashed out on a PR offensive but system integrators the INQ asked said that the HDD firm isn't yet able to implement native command queuing as yet.

Obviously, command queuing ain't for single user, single application threaded PCs. The real market is for RAID and for servers.

According to the system integrators, they've already had samples of S-ATA II drives from Samsung and from Seagate which do have a full set of features.

Multitasking is therefore much as the folk who want S-ATA II for servers desire it to be. We'll investigate further as INQ hacks migrate Old Taipei-wards. µ

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http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=23560

That was a very disappointing article...I am thinking of going with 4 of the cheap 80GB 7k250 for now...