Hitachi Australia Deskstar 7K1000.B (HDT721010SLA360)

The Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.B (HDT721010SLA360) internal hard drive may have slower transfer speeds than other "green" drives, but it's cool, quiet and energy efficient. It is also cheap, making it an attractive option.

The Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.B has three platters and a 16MB buffer. It has an areal density of 244 gigabits per square inch.

To test out the drive's speed, we transferred 18.1GB of files between the Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.B and our testbed PC, which uses a Western Digital Velociraptor (WD3000GLFS).

The Western Digital RE2 GreenPower (WD1000FYPS) proved that cutting power usage didn't necessarily mean destroying performance. The Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.B provides decent read/write speeds in its own right, but it was slower than the WD hard drive in two out of three tests.

When reading data from the drive, the Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.B achieved an average speed of 58.979 megabytes per second, and writing information to the drive was done at an average speed of 60.767MBps. Both of these times are slower than the Western Digital RE2 GreenPower's read and write speeds of 69.30MBps and 68.62MBps, respectively. However, the Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.B excelled in the copy/transfer test, where we copy files from one location on the drive to another, by achieving a fantastic speed of 43.172MBps.

The drive reached a temperature of 40°C during these tests, so it's relatively cool, although this is 6°C above the Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB (WD20EADS).

The Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.B (HDT721010SLA360) hard drive consumes 5.225W of power when idle, 7.25W when writing and 6.7W when reading. This is lower than non-"green" drives like the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB hard drive. The Western Digital RE2 GreenPower (WD1000FYPS) only used 3.47W when idling and 7.62W when reading and writing from one location on the drive to another.

The formatted capacity of the Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.B is 931MB, which means the cost per formatted gigabyte is a very low 26.7 cents. By comparison, the Western Digital RE2 GreenPower has a cost per gigabyte of 54 cents.

If you're after an energy-efficient hard drive that has a very low cost per gigabyte and is cool and quiet, then the Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.B is a worthwhile option.