Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000 3TB review

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Verdict:

It might lack support for legacy operating systems, but the Deskstar 7k3000 is still a very fast disk with masses of storage space.

Review Date: 9 May 2011

Price when reviewed: £120

Buy it now for: £200
(see more store prices)

Supplier: http://www.scan.co.uk

Reviewed By: Tom Morgan

Our Rating 5 stars out of 5

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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.

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User comments

Hitachi GPT Disk Manager

Just wanted to let you know that 3TB-capacity Retail kit ship with the Hitachi GPT Disk Manager, so no additional hardware is required to overcome the 2.2TB limitations of Windows systems. Please see our website at http://www.hitachigst.com/desktop-retail-kits

By hitachi_gst on 10 May 2011

Hitachi GPT Disk Manager

Just to let you all know additional to hitachi's comment:

I purchased this item from scan.co.uk - it does not ship with the box.

Then when you have issues with the install (im stuck with a 360gb hd at the moment) the Hitachi support don't give two hoots, i contacted them, they took 3-4 days to tell me the information is in my box..

I emailed back immediately and got a response which sent me to a link on the website, when i attempted the tool to format it (GPT disk manager) it failed to recognise my hitachi drive.

Very cool programming i can't force it to format what i know is a hitachi drive..

Awesome.

Im running windows vista 32 bit sp2 (which according to hitachi works fine with this hd as a data disk) I can tell you a couple of weeks in it doesn't.

Avoid Hitachi and go WD or seagate, much easier life IMHO..

By bradleykins on 12 Jun 2011

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