Home Hitachi’s Deskstar E7K1000 hard drive
Reviews

Hitachi’s Deskstar E7K1000 hard drive

Geoff Gasior
Disclosure
Disclosure
In our content, we occasionally include affiliate links. Should you click on these links, we may earn a commission, though this incurs no additional cost to you. Your use of this website signifies your acceptance of our terms and conditions as well as our privacy policy.
Manufacturer Hitachi
Model Deskstar E7K1000 1TB
Price (Street) $221
Availability Now

The Deskstar brand is infamous among enthusiasts, and not just because it’s a thinly-veiled attempt to tickle the Star Wars obsession that lives in the hearts of most geeks. First, there was the 75GXP failure fiasco, which fueled not only a class action lawsuit, but also our longest running comment thread. IBM eventually sold its hard drive business to Hitachi, which kept the Deskstar name intact despite the (probably undeserved) stigma associated with the name.

Under Hitachi’s tutelage, the Deskstar again made headlines, this time as the first hard drive to hit the terabyte mark. This was quite an achievement at the time—Hitachi had to squeeze a whopping five platters into the drive to hit 1TB, and it took a while for the competition to catch up. But that was nearly two years ago, and time hasn’t been kind to the first 3.5″ terabyte. Areal densities have risen dramatically, allowing other drive makers to build terabyte drives with as few as three platters. Drives with fewer platters tend to be quieter and require less power, and with higher areal densities, they’re quicker as well.

Not content to be left out, Hitachi has updated its Deskstar line with a new terabyte model primed for enterprise. With three 334GB platters, this fresh E7K1000 should easily outclass the original. The real question, however, is how it fares against the latest terabyte drives from Western Digital, Seagate, and Samsung. Join us as we put the E7K1000 through its paces against the best the competition has to offer to find out.

E is for enterprise
According to Hitachi, the Deskstar E7K1000 is designed for enterprise applications like nearline storage and RAID arrays. It’s common for drive makers to spin out enterprise versions of their desktop products; Western Digital’s RE3 is simply an enterprise version of the Caviar Black, for example, and Seagate’s Barracuda ES.2 is to workstations and servers what the Barracuda 7200.11 is to desktops. The E7K1000 looks to be an enterprise version of Hitachi’s Deskstar 7K1000.B desktop drive, with a few notable differences.

The first and perhaps most important of these differences—at least as far as the drive’s target market is concerned—is the addition of Rotational Vibration Safeguard (RVS) tech that helps to maintain drive performance in high-vibration environments. Enterprise-class drives are often tightly packed in RAID arrays or rackmount enclosures where the close proximity of other drives creates a fair amount of vibration. These surrounding vibrations can easily knock a drive head off track, slowing performance. To combat this performance loss, RVS polls vibration sensors located at several points on the drive and adjusts the head position accordingly, resulting in more consistent performance in vibration-rich locales.

Enterprise customers tend to be picky about data security, so the E7K1000 is also available with an optional Bulk Data Encryption (BDE) feature. This AES encryption scheme garbles the contents of the entire drive, but it seems more appropriate for mobile products destined for laptops than a 3.5″ drive that will probably live in a fixed, secure server room. That’s probably why BDE isn’t a standard feature for the E7K1000.


Maximum external transfer rate
300MB/s
Maximum media transfer
rate
173.5MB/s

Spindle speed
7,200RPM
Average read seek time 8.5 ms

Available
capacities
500GB, 750GB, 1TB

Cache size
32MB

Platter size
334GB

Idle power consumption
5.2W (1TB)
4.4W (500, 750GB)

Idle acoustics
2.7 bels (1TB)
2.4 bels (500, 750GB)
Mean Time Between Failures
(MTBF)
1.2 million hours

Warranty length
Five
years

Another notable difference between the Deskstar E7K1000 and its desktop counterpart is the amount of cache on the drive. Hitachi equips the E7K1000 with a full 32MB, while the desktop 7K1000.B has only 16MB. The E7K1000 is also available at fewer capacity points than its mainstream twin, with Hitachi only offering the drive in 500GB, 750GB, and 1TB flavors. All three capacities use the same 334GB platters, which appear to be identical to those used in the 7K1000.B (the 7K1000.B’s maximum media transfer rate matches that of the E7K1000, suggesting that the platters in both drives have the same areal density).

With Hitachi now packing 334GB per platter, it only takes three discs to bring the E7K1000 up to 1TB—two fewer than the first terabyte Deskstar. That’s a big drop in rotational weight, which means less work for the E7K1000’s drive motor, and lower power consumption overall. In a bid to further reduce power consumption, the drive is also endowed with Hitachi Voltage Efficiency Regulator Technology (HiVERT) tricks borrowed from Travelstar mobile line. Hard drives step down the 5V and 12V power they get from a system’s PSU, and according to Hitachi, HiVERT improves the efficiency of this conversion.

Another benefit to Hitachi moving its terabyte from five to three platters should be lower noise levels; in our experience, drives with fewer platters tend to be quieter than those with more. Deskstars also feature an Advanced Acoustic Management (AAM) capability that allows users to adjust seek ferocity. Drives are typically tuned for maximum performance by default, but with Hitachi’s drive feature tool, one can easily optimize for silence. We’ll be testing the E7K1000 in both its default performance configuration and optimized for lower acoustics to illustrate AAM’s impact on not only noise levels, but performance as well.

More extensive validation testing and additional warranty coverage are the last two perks the Deskstar E7K1000 picks up from its enterprise focus. The drive is rated for a Mean Time Between Failures of 1.2 million hours, which is typical for an enterprise-class drive. Hitachi also covers the E7K1000 with a five-year warranty that offers two more years of coverage than you get with an ordinary desktop Deskstar.

Test notes
We’ll be comparing the performance of the Deskstar E7K1000 with that of a slew of competitors, including some of the latest and greatest Serial ATA drives from Hitachi, Samsung, Seagate, and Western Digital. These drives differ when it comes to external transfer rates, spindle speeds, cache sizes, platter densities, and capacity, all of which can have an impact on performance. Keep in mind the following differences as we move through our benchmarks:


Max external
transfer rate

Spindle speed

Cache size

Platter size

Capacity

Barracuda 7200.11
300MB/s 7,200RPM 32MB 250GB 1TB

Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB
300MB/s 7,200RPM 32MB 375GB 1.5TB

Barracuda ES.2
300MB/s 7,200RPM 32MB 250GB 1TB

Caviar Black
300MB/s 7,200RPM 32MB 334GB 1TB

Caviar GP
300MB/s 5,400-7,200RPM 16MB 250GB 1TB

Caviar Green
300MB/s 5,400-7,200RPM 32MB 333GB 1TB


Caviar SE16 (640GB)
300MB/s 7,200RPM 16MB 320GB 640GB

Deskstar 7K1000
300MB/s 7,200RPM 32MB 200GB 1TB

Deskstar E7K1000
300MB/s 7,200RPM 32MB 334GB 1TB


Raptor WD1500ADFD
150MB/s 10,000RPM 16MB 75GB 150GB

RE2-GP
300MB/s 5,400-7,200RPM 16MB 250GB 1TB

RE3
300MB/s 7,200RPM 32MB 334GB 1TB

SpinPoint F1
300MB/s 7,200RPM 32MB 334GB 1TB

VelociRaptor VR150
300MB/s 10,000RPM 16MB 150GB 300GB

Note that we have two versions of Western Digital’s GreenPower desktop Caviar. The Caviar GP is the original GreenPower drive, model number WD10EACS, while the Caviar Green is the new WD10EADS derivative.

Performance data from such a daunting collection of drives can make our bar graphs a little hard to read, so we’ve colored the bars by manufacturer, with the Deskstar E7K1000 appearing in brighter red than the original 7K1000. You’ll also find two versions of the E7K1000 listed. One is the drive’s default performance configuration while the second, denoted by (AAM), has the drive configured to run at its quietest.

Since the E7K1000 is being targeted at servers and workstations, you’ll want to pay particularly close attention to how it fares against other enterprise-class drives, such as Seagate’s Barracuda ES.2 and Western Digital’s RE3 and RE2-GP.

Our testing methods
All tests were run three times, and their results were averaged, using the following test system.

Processor Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.4GHz
System bus 800MHz (200MHz quad-pumped)
Motherboard Asus P5WD2 Premium
Bios revision 0422
North bridge Intel 955X MCH
South bridge Intel ICH7R
Chipset drivers Chipset 7.2.1.1003
AHCI/RAID 5.1.0.1022
Memory size 1GB (2 DIMMs)
Memory type Micron DDR2 SDRAM at 533MHz
CAS latency (CL) 3
RAS to CAS delay (tRCD) 3
RAS precharge (tRP) 3
Cycle time (tRAS) 8
Audio codec ALC882D
Graphics Radeon X700 Pro 256MB with CATALYST 5.7 drivers
Hard drives Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1TB
Seagate Barracuda ES.2 1TB
Samsung SpinPoint F1 1TB
Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 1TB

Western Digital RE2- GP 1TB

Western Digital Caviar GP 1TB

Western Digital VelociRaptor 300GB

Western Digital Raptor WD1500ADFD 150GB


Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB

Western Digital Caviar SE16 640GB

Western Digital RE3 1TB


Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB


Western Digital Caviar Green 1TB

Hitachi Deskstar E7K1000 1TB
OS Windows XP Professional
OS updates Service Pack 2

Thanks to NCIX for getting us the Deskstar 7K1000 and SpinPoint F1.

Our test system was powered by an OCZ PowerStream power supply unit.

We used the following versions of our test applications:

The test systems’ Windows desktop was set at 1280×1024 in 32-bit color at an 85Hz screen refresh rate. Vertical refresh sync (vsync) was disabled for all tests.

All the tests and methods we employed are publicly available and reproducible. If you have questions about our methods, hit our forums to talk with us about them.

WorldBench
WorldBench uses scripting to step through a series of tasks in common Windows applications. It then produces an overall score. WorldBench also spits out individual results for its component application tests, allowing us to compare performance in each. We’ll look at the overall score, and then we’ll show individual application results.

The Deskstar E7K1000 can’t quite catch Western Digital’s 640GB Caviar in WorldBench, but it comes mighty close. Fiddling with the drive’s AAM settings doesn’t have an impact on WorldBench’s overall score, either.

Multimedia editing and encoding

MusicMatch Jukebox

Windows Media Encoder

Adobe Premiere

VideoWave Movie Creator

Among WorldBench’s multimedia editing and encoding tests, only Premiere is able to tease meaningful performance differences from our collection of drives. The Deskstar fares well in the Premiere test, where it’s just a few seconds off the pace set by Western Digital’s VelociRaptor. Again, there’s little difference in performance between the Deskstar’s performance and silent modes.

Image processing

Adobe Photoshop

ACDSee PowerPack

WorldBench’s Photoshop test doesn’t stress the storage subsystem, but ACDSee does spread the field a little. The E7K1000 sits in the middle of the pack in that test, where it’s notably slower than Western Digital’s enterprise-oriented RE3. Switching the Deskstar from performance to quiet mode results in a minor performance hit, but four seconds over more than an eight-minute test isn’t much of a margin.

Multitasking and office applications

Microsoft Office

Mozilla

Mozilla and Windows Media Encoder

There isn’t much to see through WorldBench’s office and multitasking tests.

Other applications

WinZip

Nero

However, both Nero and WinZip provide opportunities for faster drives to differentiate themselves. In the latter, the Deskstar is in good company, hanging just a few seconds behind the RE3. The E7K1000’s position improves in Nero, where it’s quicker than the RE3 and only trails the 640GB Caviar and 10K-RPM VelociRaptor.

Through both the Nero and WinZip tests, we again see little difference in performance between the Deskstar’s AAM modes.

Boot and load times
To test system boot and game level load times, we busted out our trusty stopwatch.

In a bit of a surprise, the latest terabyte Deskstar actually boots into Windows slower than its predecessor. The E7K1000 sits near the back of the field, although it at least boots quicker than the RE3, which is the slowest of the lot. Note that tweaking the Deskstar’s AAM settings for silence costs four seconds when it comes time to boot.

AAM doesn’t have an impact on level load times, though. The Deskstar does well loading up our Doom 3 level, but it falls towards the back of the middle of the pack in Far Cry.

File Copy Test
File Copy Test is a pseudo-real-world benchmark that times how long it takes to create, read, and copy files in various test patterns. File copying is tested twice: once with the source and target on the same partition, and once with the target on a separate partition. Scores are presented in MB/s.

To make things easier to read, we’ve separated our FC-Test results into individual graphs for each test pattern. We’ll tackle file creation performance first.

The E7K1000’s file creation times aren’t the fastest we’ve seen, but the Deskstar still does well in this first wave of file manipulation tests. It’s only a little slower than the RE3 here, and light years ahead of the Barracuda ES.2. Tuning the drive’s Advanced Acoustic Management for silence does lower file creation speeds a little, but at worst we’re only looking at about a 2MB/s drop in performance.

Moving to read tests, the Deskstar slips ahead of the RE3 and is beaten only by the 10K-RPM VelociRaptor and Seagate’s 375GB-per-platter Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB. AAM settings have little impact on the E7K1000’s performance in these tests.

FC-Test – continued

Next, File Copy Test combines read and write tasks in some, er, copy tests.

Copy tests combine read and write components, and while the Deskstar continues to do well, it plays second fiddle to the RE3 with four of five test patterns (although by less than 200KB/s with one of them). At least the Hitachi drive is consistently out ahead of the Barracuda ES.2, which is significantly slower through all five test patterns.

The results of our partition copy tests play out much like the standard copy tests, but this time the E7K1000 manages to edge out the RE3 with two of five test patterns. Tuning the Deskstar’s AAM setting does have an impact on performance, but in these tests, it’s a minor one at best.

iPEAK multitasking
We’ve developed a series of disk-intensive multitasking tests to highlight the impact of seek times and command queuing on hard drive performance. You can get the low-down on these iPEAK-based tests here. The mean service time of each drive is reported in milliseconds, with lower values representing better performance.

The Deskstar is marginally faster when set to silent mode through our first batch of iPEAK multitasking workloads. It puts on a good show overall, beating out the RE3 with three of five workloads and staying ahead of the Barracuda ES.2 throughout.

Hitachi’s strong showing continues through our second wave of iPEAK workloads, which the Deskstar handles with aplomb. The drive is faster than the Barracuda ES.2 with three of four workloads, and goes two for four against the RE3.

The Deskstar doesn’t show any particular weaknesses in our multitasking tests. In fact, if you average the mean service time across all nine workloads, the E7K1000 is the second fastest drive overall, falling only to Seagate’s latest 1.5TB Barracuda.

IOMeter
IOMeter presents a good test case for both seek times and command queuing.

The Deskstar does have a weakness, though, and it’s readily apparent when we fire up IOMeter. Even with its default performance-oriented configuration, the E7K1000’s transaction rates are significantly lower than those of the RE3, particularly when the number of concurrent I/O requests scales up. The Deskstar even falls behind the Barracuda ES.2 with three of the four test patterns, and it gets even slower when we skew its AAM setting for silence.

At least the Deskstar’s IOMeter CPU utilization is low, but then that’s the case for every other drive.

HD Tach
We tested HD Tach with the benchmark’s full variable zone size setting.

In a straight-line transfer rate drag race, the E7K1000 is among the fastest mechanical hard drives we’ve tested. What’s particularly impressive here is that the Deskstar’s sustained transfer rates are higher than those of every other drive that packs 334GB per platter. Only two contenders are quicker than the E7K1000 here; one has a higher spindle speed and the other a higher capacity per platter.

Hitachi has improved the Deskstar’s burst performance significantly, allowing the E7K1000 to offer over 35MB/s more peak throughput than the original 7K1000.

Fiddling with the Deskstar’s AAM setting hasn’t made much of a difference so far, but it clearly impacts the drive’s random access times. The E7K1000’s random access time is 3.5 milliseconds slower with AAM optimized for silence, sending the drive from the middle of the pack to the very back.

HD Tach’s CPU utilization results are within the app’s +/- 2% margin of error for this test.

Noise levels
Noise levels were measured with an Extech 407727 Digital Sound Level meter 1″ from the side of the drives at idle and under an HD Tach seek load. Drives were run with the PCB facing up.

The Deskstar E7K1000 is one of the quietest 3.5″ drives we’ve tested at idle, but it’s a little louder under a seek load. Here we see AAM pay off to the tune of two-and-a-half decibels, muffling an otherwise audible clicking when the drive seeks.

Power consumption
For our power consumption tests, we measured the voltage drop across a 0.1-ohm resistor placed in line with the 5V and 12V lines connected to each drive. Through the magic of Ohm’s Law, we were able to calculate the power draw from each voltage rail and add them together for the total power draw of the drive.

AAM pays unexpected power consumption dividends, lowering the Deskstar’s draw by half a watt at idle and more than three watts when seeking. That’s enough to drop the E7K1000’s power consumption below that of Western Digital’s RE2-GP, which has a lower spindle speed in the 5,400-RPM range. In fact, with AAM enabled, the Deskstar consumes less power than any other 7,200-RPM terabyte we’ve tested.

Conclusions
Hitachi took its time updating the terabyte Deskstar with new platters, but the wait has been worth it. Not only is the E7K1000 significantly faster than its 7K1000 forebear, it’s quieter and more power-efficient, too. In fact, this latest Deskstar is quite competitive overall, boasting solid application performance and a particularly strong showing in our iPEAK multitasking tests. The E7K1000 also held its own in FC-Test and registered the highest sustained transfer rates we’ve seen from a drive with 334GB platters. Even more impressive is the fact that backing off the Deskstar’s seek ferocity doesn’t have much of an impact on overall performance.

Tweaking the E7K1000’s Advanced Acoustic Management setting to optimize for silence noticeably lowers the drive’s seek noise levels, making it one of the quietest terabytes around. And even with AAM in its factory-default performance configuration, this latest Deskstar is still one of the quietest 3.5″ drives at idle. AAM tuning is also capable of lowering the E7K1000’s power consumption by a few watts, making it the most power-efficient terabyte at 7,200RPM.

Lower power consumption will surely be appreciated by the enterprise crowd Hitachi is trying to tempt with the E7K1000. However, those folks are also likely to pay close attention to the drive’s poor showing in IOMeter, which is really the only blemish on the Deskstar’s performance record. But it’s a big blemish, and in a test that specifically simulates the sort of multi-user workloads faced by enterprise-class drives.

Of course, it doesn’t help that the E7K1000 is also quite expensive. The drive’s online availability appears to be quite limited, which could be one reason why it’s currently selling in the $220-250 range. Hitachi apparently started shipping the drive last summer, though, so it’s not like the E7K1000 is fresh off the boat. Western Digital’s RE3 only started shipping last fall, but you can already get one for as little as $160. The RE3 is generally faster overall, too.

The combination of a relatively high price and comparative poor IOMeter performance ultimately sinks the Deskstar E7K1000’s appeal, particularly for the enterprise applications at which it’s targeted. Hitachi has done well to keep up with platter density developments, but the E7K1000 needs to be a lot cheaper to offer compelling or even competitive value.

Latest News

White House Announces New Set of Rules for Federal Agencies Using AI
News

White House Announces New Set of Rules for Federal Agencies Using AI

4 Canadian School Boards Sue Three Social Media Giants
News

4 Canadian School Boards Have Sued 3 Social Media Giants for Sabotaging Young Minds

Four of the largest school boards in Canada have filed a lawsuit against social media giants for being addictive, disrupting student learning, and harming their mental health. The lawsuit seeks...

Slothana goes parabolic
Crypto News

Traders Transfer $2.2 Million in Solana to Emerging Meme Cryptocurrency Slothana

Slothana is a Solana-based meme coin that launched four days ago and has raised over $2.2M since. Currently, you can buy 10,000 SLOTH with 1 SOL (~$188). The meme project...

Reddit Shares Fall 16% In A Day After Promoters Sell
News

Reddit Shares Fall 16% in a Day after Promoters Sell One Million Shares

Gold Miner Nilam Resources Shares Surge 22x Amidst Bitcoin Buying Announcement
Crypto News

Gold Miner Nilam Resources Shares Surge 22x Amidst Bitcoin Buying Announcement

BlackRock CEO Goes Bullish on BTC as Spot Bitcoin ETF Crosses $17 Billion
Crypto News

BlackRock CEO Goes Bullish on BTC as Spot Bitcoin ETF Crosses $17 Billion

Elliott Wave Pattern Indicates Ripple (XRP) Might Surge to $13
Crypto News

Elliott Wave Pattern Indicates Ripple (XRP) Might Surge to $13