"A Windows 7 image loaded with our test suite was cloned to a 50GB partition at the beginning of each drive"

First let me say that I understand short stroking. Why do you still do this? If you image a drive, isn't all the data at the start anyway? With technologies like Ultimate Defrag do you really ever need to do something like this?

That way you can ensure that all the data written to the drive stay in the first 50gb of the drive. I understand that running many benchmark creates a huge amount of writes / delete to the drive. When you delete a file, the data itself is not deleted but rather simply the index and new data will be written somewhere else on the drive (could be anywhere if you have a 2tb partition). It's easier to track performance in a 50GB area rather than 2TB.

Good review pretty much agree with all that. I've used a few of these now and I can say it's the first green drive I've used that you don't feel you are making a tradeoff performance wise for.

Very little in it between these new ones and the 7K1000c drives performance wise they're that good. Though I still feel the WB black has more vibration than the 7k Hitachi but that's a personal thing I guess. I think the 5k3000 is one of the better green drive choices..problem is with the WD merger looming just how long will they be around for?? Or will WD continue with a Hitachi line up..I'm not so sure

There's the same difference as bewteen any 5400 and 7200 rpm. Transfer speeds are basically the same because the 7K1000.C is older but that's not all there is to performance. The equivalent model is the 7K3000.

I believe the 5K3000 runs a bit faster rpm than the equivalent Samsung and WD drives. Density increases over time which has improved performance.
You have to make a choice between performance/price and quiet. I've used quite a few 7k1000 drives because they're reliable and if you can dampen the vibrations they're not noisy and perform pretty well overall. But the new 5K3000 has impressed me have to say.

I suppose those who want performance might consider an SSD and a green drive to offer a pretty good combination.

The transfer speed looked more like that of a 5400 rpm. But 5400 and 5900 are close enough: I could easily have missed the difference.

Yeah: for most desktops, spinning drive performance is not an issue because you're using an SSD. On servers and other data-crunching machines for which one can't get a big enough SSD, 7200 rpm (or faster) can still make sense. For recording a stream at high speed, 7200 rpm drives might also make sense, especially since the highest platter densities are not available for slower drives.

I wish your review had come out a few days sooner . I bought the Samsung EcoGreen F4, but it seems you found the Hitachi better all around. I am not going to tear my hair out, though. I like the F4 well enough. It is silent in my PC, and I am using it primarily for storage, running the OS and applications off an SSD. Nice review, thorough, as always. There are so many bad HDD reviews out there. Then you read people's reviews on shopping sites, such as Newegg or Amazon, and you see the unbelievable failure rates reported there. It's difficult to make up one's mind.

I currently have four different 2 TB drives in different rigs, and they have all been reliable so far. It's important to research the RMA process, as all drives eventually fail. For me, it's essential that the RMA includes the option to send a replacement drive right away, even if it costs a few bucks. Sadly, not all manufacturers offer this type of service.

Hoping to get some information to debunk or confirm some comment I heard about this drive:

Does anyone have experience with these in a RAID setup?
(It was said that compared to other consumer-drives, Hitachi has a lot less of the TLER-type problems.)

Any defect drives yet?
(Someone said high failure rates were reported for this drive, a statement he supported with a link that pointed to no relevant information at all...)

The way they sound to me now, is like sometime I would love that I would like to buy a lot of to replace all my old (some of which are loud/vibrating ) drives with and build a big RAID array .

I have 4x 5k3000 in my server (not in raid) and no issues at all, really a nice storage drive, specially for WHSv1 since its still old format 512 hdd. Planning on getting 8 more once they drop in price when 4tb come out.

It's definitely a factor for real world use and some benchmarks but benchmarks like HDTune/HDTach use the entire drive and ignore partitions.

For this review every benchmark other than HDTune benefits or can benefit from the short stroking.

How does this compare with notebook 2.5 HD drives?

The Momentus XT is included in the results; it's the fastest 2.5" hard drive we've tested.

When a test Hitachi 7K750 (2,5")?
For now it is just my review;

http://forum.pclab.pl/topic/702722-mikr ... cichofili/

For a hi-cap storage drive it's between the WD20EARS and this 5K3000. The Hitachi gives more noise for more speed. If it's within my noise threshold, I'm golden. But I don't think I'll know before buying the drive.

I'm happy to report that a RAID1 with 2 of these drives in a DNS-320 enclosure work perfectly well! I really wanted the 3TB though, but the price wasn't as good and there are problems with the current DNS-320 firmware version to work with bigger capacity drives.

I haven't done any scientific speed testing and such, but so far write speed seems to hover around 20MB/s and read around 32MB/s which is a great upgrade compared to my older DNS-323 with 2x1.5TB 7.2K which hovered around 12MB/s and 15MB/s. Clearly the 800 MHz CPU really helps VS the 500 MHz, altough the enclosure itself is made of cheaper quality (all plastic exterior VS metal outside case).

What program did you use for the "File Copy" bench?