Hitachi Deskstar 2 TB Price Review

The Deskstar 5K3000 hard drive gives an huge capacity up to 3TB and features groundbreaking CoolSpin technology to deliver a greater level of power efficiency and calm operation for energy conscious, environmentally friendly computers. Key to CoolSpin technology is an optimization of motor speed to offer an ideal balance of performance, power utilization and acoustics. The CoolSpin technology, with other Hitachi power management methods, gives the Deskstar 5K3000 its 29 power savings over the Deskstar 7K3000. This new drive is the 1st Hitachi CoolSpin hard drive with a 6Gb/s SATA interface. With low power, high capacity and cool operation, the 3.5 inch Deskstar 5K3000 lets manufacturers to leverage the benefits of the new parts and operating systems to deliver more eco friendly systems. CoolSpin technology delivers greater power efficiency and calm operation. View larger

33 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of five stars amazingly fast Green drive, February 26, 2011
By D. Parvin “dparv” (Boston, MA USA) See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE) (REAL NAME) () This review is from: Hitachi Deskstar two TB 3.5 Inch CoolSpin RPM SATA III 6Gbps 32 MB Cache interior Hard Drive 0F12117 (Electronics) The Hitachi 5K3000 is a hard two TB Green drive that looks to run 20 25 faster than fellow Green alternatives. Five stars.

The bottom line for performance is that spindle speed that runs at 5940 rpm, or 500 700 rpm faster than alternatives, looks to observably increase performance. Sequential read/write is in a remarkable 140ish MB/s range versus 90 95 MB/s or so for my last generation WD EACS and EADS models. It is certainly still not a 7200 rpm drive though; real read access times seem to come out in the 19 ms range, or on par to slower than other Green drives, and the 32 MB cache versus 64 MB for competitors does bound burst speed a bit. Nobody will ever mistake this for an SSD or 15k rpm SCSI, but in a pinch this may be fast enough to do a decent job masquerading as a main desktop drive.

These are calm drives. Now they are in a Tivo Premiere and a 4 in 3 RAID five array, and neither setup produces any audible drive sound over the fans used to cool their respective enclosures. My own casual testing showed pretty decent power consumption; with a Kill a watt hooked up to the rig, the in general draw seemed to be around a 5 6 watt range per drive while undertaking expanded SMART tests, or generally alike to other competitors marketed as Green. These also do seem to run cooler in the drive enclosure than my last drives depending on a simple radiant heat touch test.

Reliability at this early stage is generally a crapshoot, but a three year warranty will help. Suggested.

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27 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of five stars Great HDD for home NAS and great price for 2TB HDD, February 26, 2011
By Vlad See all my reviews This review is from: Hitachi Deskstar two TB 3.5 Inch CoolSpin RPM SATA III 6Gbps 32 MB Cache interior Hard Drive 0F12117 (Electronics) I bought four of these HDDs for my home made NAS and they’re working great and fast enough.
They have really remarkable performance for green HDD. Comparable to WD Green drives, they are the best.
I host lots of services on my NAS for many users(20). No lags, no problems, everything works great.

Don’t worry that they’re SATA III, but you have SATA II interface, on these and nearly all non SSD drives you will not get extra performance at alll.
To get at least 3 5 of extra speed on SATA III, you HDD drive can read/write at least 220 230MB/s.

Hdparm test:
Root@nasik:# hdparm t /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
Timing buffered disk reads: 402 MB in 3.00 seconds = 133.82 MB/sec
Root@nasik:# hdparm t /dev/sdb

/dev/sdb:
Timing buffered disk reads: 390 MB in 3.01 seconds = 129.47 MB/sec
Root@nasik:# hdparm t /dev/sdc

/dev/sdc:
Timing buffered disk reads: 378 MB in 3.00 seconds = 125.88 MB/sec
Root@nasik:# hdparm t /dev/sdd

/dev/sdd:
Timing buffered disk reads: 394 MB in 3.01 seconds = 130.98 MB/sec


NAS config:
1. 8GB USB flash OS installed.
2. Two x 2GB Dual Channel DDR3 Memory
3. Four x 5K3000 Hitachi 2TB HDD
4. CPU: Intel Core i3 Processor i3 530 2.93GHz 4MB LGA1156
5. Motherboard: Intel Media Series Mini ITX Motherboard behind Intel fast Storage Technology (RAID) BOXDH57JG
6. Case: SERVER CHA CHENBRO ES34169 BK 120R. To decrease sound, fan voltage is changed from 12V to 5V.
7. Extra fan for case Vantec Stealth SF6025L 60x60x25mm Double Ball Bearing Silent Case Fan (Black)”
8. CASE needs low profile fan for CPU Thermaltake thin X3 Low Profile 36mm Height CPU Cooler CLP0534
9. OS: Ubuntu Linux 10.10
It is $400 hardware set + $current price 4=. For four HDDs, much cheaper than baying Atom/ARM established NASes which are costly and slow.

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Five of five people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of five stars Great calm drives to complement growing media storage needs, April 23, 2011
By Brian Dickerson See all my reviews () This review is from: Hitachi Deskstar two TB 3.5 Inch CoolSpin RPM SATA III 6Gbps 32 MB Cache interior Hard Drive 0F12117 (Electronics) When ran a promotional pricing on these Hitachi hard drives, I leapt on the chance to upgrade my present 1TB drives and make space for future storage prerequisites.

The drives arrived filled pretty well, but the creative cardboard suspension of the box design didn’t leave many of open air space around the drive. It could have been favored to see many extra packing or buffer material to better protect them throughout shipping. I understand that the drives are sold as OEM and that there’s a growing initiative to conserve on consumed materials, but they are sensitive devices.

Upon unpacking and installing the drives, I ran a full disk format and surface test on each of them. The 1st two had no issues and SMART stated no trouble regions. The 3rd drive, but, made a scattered set of unreadable/bad sectors and SMART stated surface errors and slow to read/unreadable regions. The drive was usable, as bad sectors may be and are frequently remapped to remain unused, but I opted to exercise Amazon’s great return system and had a substitute drive sent to me. The substitute drive tested just good, and they’re spinning away in my system.

I’ve owned enough hard drives over the years to understand that there are failure peaks at installation time, and can characterize the compromised drive as an early/factory faulty. I dont have doubts as to the dependability the drives once put into field service and when they passed the initial surface verify/SMART tests. I feel that this is a good practice for any system builder or end user some hours of testing can prevent weeks or months of headaches as you attempt to track down what finally stems from a first use defect.

As to the drives themselves, they run very cool; they remain room temperature after uninterrupted use, in stark contrast to many 7200RPM models. They’re also very calm in operation, barely audible by themselves, and surely nothing that will observably increase the sound level of a common computer enclosure. This could be a good drive for a MicroATX or Home Theater PC build, where cramped conditions can cause temperatures to soar. It could also work well in an external drive enclosure that doesn’t use a fan for cooling, as little heat will have to be dissipated through the case. Move rates are respectable, averaging at about 100MB/s across the disk surface for read speeds. Great for media storage, or for a NAS or another networked storage array or backup solution.

I’m happy with the drives they were a great value and are perfect for my application. Spacious, cool, calm and an excellent complement to a hard state boot drive. I did get a drive that showed signs of failure right out of the gate, but I will not fault the other drives for what is probably a statistical outlier.

Recommended!

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