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Hitachi 5k3000 3TB review

Hitachi 5k3000 3TB
Our Rating :
Price when reviewed : £164
inc VAT

Great performance for a 5,400RPM disk, but the faster 7k3000 costs £44 less, and is the obvious choice.

Specifications

3TB sata hard disk

http://www.morecomputers.com

If performance isn’t the most important factor you look for when buying a hard disk, the Hitachi Deskstar 5k3000 looks like a great middle ground. It’s almost identical to the range-topping Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000; both use the newer SATA3 interface and have massive 3TB capacities. The only two differences between them are the spindle speed and amount of cache. The 5k3000 has a 5,400RPM spindle speed and 32MB of cache, which on paper makes it slower than the 7k3000 with its 7,200RPM spindle and 64MB cache.

As we expected, file transfer speeds were certainly slower than the 7k3000; it managed 87.3MB/s write and 120.3MB/s read speeds in our large file test. Smaller files were slower still, writing at 74.5MB/s and reading at 75.5MB/s, but these are still very reasonable scores for an ultra-high capacity disk. It took 37 seconds to load Crysis, almost seven seconds slower than the 7k3000.

Hitachi 5k3000 3TB

Like all disks over 2.2TB, the 5k3000 can’t be used as a Windows boot disk unless you have an EFI motherboard and 64-bit operating system. Older versions of Windows aren’t officially supported either, so you’ll have to use a third party workaround to get it to work on XP.

The overall performance gap between the 5k3000 and 7k3000 is around 10-15 per cent, which although not significant is still enough for us to recommend the faster disk. The meagre energy savings that come from using a 5,400RPM disk aren’t enough to justify the otherwise unexplained premium of £44 on top of the price of the Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000 3TB.

Basic Specifications

Rating **

Storage

Capacity 3TB
Formatted capacity 2.72TB
Price per gigabyte £0.06
Interface SATA3
Power connector SATA
Spindle speed 5,400rpm
Cache 32MB
Seek time 8.9ms
Platters 5
Heads 1
Bearing technology fluid dynamic
Noise (in normal use) 29dB(A)

Buying Information

Price £164
Warranty Two years RTB
Supplier http://www.morecomputers.com
Details www.hitachigst.com

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