Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.C 1TB review

The Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.C is one of the cheapest 1TB internal hard disks we’ve seen. It costs just 5p per gigabyte thanks to its low price of just £45. Previous Deskstars we’ve seen have done quite well in our file transfer benchmarks and we had no reason to suspect that the 7K1000.C would be any different. It has a high spindle speed of 7,200rpm, 32MB of cache and uses two 500GB platters, but the results of our benchmarks show that one can’t gauge hard disk performance from specifications alone.

We were surprised and disappointed by the Deskstar’s inconsistent results in our file transfer tests. It’s one of the slowest disks we’ve seen in a while at writing files. Large files were written at 75.7MB/s, while small files were written at 46MB/s – far behind the competition. Its performance reading files was much better. Large files were read at 103MB/s which is in line what we’d expect, while small files were read very quickly at 104.4MB/s – a chart topping score.

This quick file reading performance was noticeable in our Crysis test, where we timed how long it took the Deskstar to load a large game level. It took 36 seconds which is among the quickest times we’ve seen for an internal hard disk.

The Deskstar may be cheap, but it is only covered by a one year warranty, which is short compared to the two, three or even five year warranties available for competing disks. Even if you can live with this and the slow write speeds, there are better value disks available. Samsung’s SpinPoint F3 1TB costs only £2 more, but its performance is in a different league.