Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000 2 TB

Hitachi has updated its range of internal hard drives with two new series of HDDs: the Deskstar 5K3000 and 7K3000. The 7K3000 drives have a spin speed of 7200 rpm, 64 MB of cache and and 1.5 TB, 2 TB or 3 TB of storage space. Today, we'll be taking a look at the 2 TB model (HDS723020BLA642, see sidebar).

Note that this 3.5-inch hard drive has a SATA-3 connection, allowing maximum theoretical data transfer speeds of 6 Gbps.

Remember that unlike the hard drive's overall score, its rating  in this section is based on a comparison been all the drives we've ever tested, including SSDs. This can help explain surprisingly low scores.

Although most HDDs barely get more than one star in this part of the test, this Hitachi 7K3000 2 TB drive, like the WD Caviar Black 2 TB, is one of the very few models that managed to get two stars. The Hitachi HDD even comes in slightly ahead of the WD drive:

 

 

In fact, the Hitachi 7K3000 2 TB has set a new record in our pure performance tests with CrystalDisk Mark and AS-SSD:
 

Access times are slightly lower than with the best drives on the market:
 

They are, however, still good enough to ensure excellent performances in practice, as we'll see below.

The practical tests confirm the excellent results seen above. The PCMark Vantage score places the Hitachi 7K3000 2 TB HDD neck and neck with the WD Caviar Black 2 TB:
 

Our purely practical tests show the same thing: