i've got 3 of the hitachis, built nov'09, purchased in dec'09. i kinda feel more justified about jumping on them when they first showed up after seeing a review of them.

they've consistently been one of the best priced drives on the market from what i've seen, definitely a great value. i dont think i would give mine a 5 for vibration, but the dampened mounts in the mini p180 definitely factor into that... plus ive got em all tuned with aam.

i absolutely love them. definitely very fast for storing large media files, hd video and the like. with my setup theyre spun down and idle unless im watching a movie, or encoding hd content, so its great.

i've actually got them out of my pc right now so i dont have any solid numbers, but in my environment they consistently ran cooler than my other drives (a few older wd and seagate 7k rpm models), and i dont think ive ever seen an error reported through smart data.

This is just the review I've been waiting for!

Thank you!


The only thing missing was a Samsung F3 1TB. It's cheap, really fast but reports all over the Web state that it hums loudly.

Nice review, Thanks !

Thank you for this review! Like a breath of fresh air with all slate hype.

I was disappointed with the noise on the 500 GB Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.C HDS721050CLA362 drive, with clear clicking sounds constantly, whether it was a variance in production or as in intended.
Happy to learn the new Hitachi drive is back to low noise in it's fastest configuration.

Hitachi drives has a utility called a Feature tool where you can adjust AAM setting and also APM(advanced power management) settings. The default value for APM is highest performance setting, and as I recall, 7K1000.B drives shaved off a couple of watts when the APM setting was set to power saving mode. Any chance, you could try the benchmarks with the APM setting adjusted to power saving mode?

Do you have any plans to review the Samsung F3 1TB?