Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000 3TB review

Hitachi wasn’t the first manufacturer to release a 3TB internal hard disk, but it was the first to produce one with a 7,200RPM spindle speed. Combined with SATA3 support, the Deskstar 7k3000 certainly looks the business on paper.

We were certainly impressed with its performance in our file transfer benchmarks. The Deskstar wrote large files at 104.4MB/s and read them at an even faster 141.6MB/s. It also handled smaller files very well, writing at 90.9MB/s and reading at 100.7MB/s. The generous 64MB of cache also helped load Crysis in 32 seconds.

With 2.72TB of usable space, it makes a lot of sense as a storage disk. However, it still has the usual limitations associated with high capacity storage. Unless you have a motherboard that uses EFI, of which there are still very few available, it can’t be used as a boot disk. Your choice of operating system may also be a stumbling block; unlike other manufacturers, Hitachi hasn’t supplied a workaround for the disk to enable Windows XP support. Unless you use a third-party hardware or software workaround, the older operating system won’t recognise the disk at all.

In spite of these limitations, it was still one of the fastest ultra-high capacity disks we’ve tested. If you’re looking for a boot disk it makes more sense to look elsewhere, but the very low price per gigabyte makes it an exceptionally good value disk.