Hitachi GST Deskstar 7K80 HDS728080PLA380 (0A30356) 80GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5″ Hard Drive Bare Drive

Pros: Good Read/write speed
SATAII
NCQ
Cheap
No annoying whining like 10k/15k rpm drives.
Provides both SATA and standard 4pin molex power connectors.

Cons: Seeks are a bit noisy.
Max Sustainable read/write speed could be better, but you can’t expect much from a budget drive like this.

Overall Review: great budget drives for anyone looking to make a Raid. I have two of these running in Raid0 and the performance is defintiely noticeably faster than my old 80gb ata133. They are a bit noisy during seeks but not the kind of noise maxxxx/westernxxxxxxx make. I like being able to hear when my computer is doing Disk I/O and i wouldn’t exactly call it annoying, it does a good job of muting the sound, but it’s a price you pay for high performance seeks/writes. I ran a scandisk type program in linux and both came out flawless. individual buffered reads was about 57MB/s which is pretty standard, but with NCQ and SATA it makes these great performers in Raid.

Pros: First, let me say that when backing up computer games on your hard drive, Sata3gb is the way to go. I can install games like Far Cry on my 64bit 3200+ in less than five minutes by storing the .iso on this drive and then installing to same said drive. When copying and moving files, formatting, etc, this thing is a beast. Great for media storage, too.

Cons: I can’t really think of any. This thing has outperformed my expectations.

Overall Review: Newegg rocks. Fo’ life.

Pros: SATA 3Gb/s, NCQ

Cons: Need to download Hitachi Feature Tools to enable 300MB/s
A little noisy

Overall Review: I purchased 2 of these and have them set up in a RAID1 array.

Make sure you download Hitachi Feature Tools. This will let you enable the drives to run at 300MB/s.

The drives are a bit noisy but with the case on, they are not that bad. Also, in Hitachi Feature Tools, there is an option to reduce the noise on the drives (by giving up a little performance). At one point on the scale, the noise is noticably reduced.

Pros: Fast read/write.
Thinner then my old maxtor or western digital drives.
Price.
Quiet.

Cons: You need to run Hitachi Feature Tools to turn on SATAII transfer rate.

Overall Review: I have 2 of these running in RAID 0 connected to a Promise TX2300 SATAII RAID card, everything is working great but if you have a add in RAID card from Promise you will not be able to run the Hitachi Feature Tool to turn on SATAII speed on the drives because it does not work with Promise RAID cards. This is information I got from Hitachi tech support. You will need another SATAII connection to get in to the drive to turn on SATAII speed. Hitachi recomends a motherboard based solution to do this.

Pros: Hitachi drives are quiet, snappy, inexpensive, and have a three-year warranty. The drives are consistant (the performance you get matches the drives that are benchmarked on review sites, which is more than I can say for my previous favorite two-letter drive maker). Hands down the best drives on the shelves right now.

Cons: I had one drive that always spun down and then up on reboot, reguardless of “autospin” jumper position. This doesn’t apply to the SATA flavor.

Pros: yeah i was worried about this drive but !….after buying two of these and getting them in raid array 0 wit 3.0gb/s enable i hope to never go back ! just incredible of course you need processing power and plenty of ram but to and from a disk is….effortless …wow!

Cons: only if they go out in the near future 🙂

Overall Review: ya gotta get these ! anda sata 2 main brd

Comments: I found a site where it says that this hard drive is NCQ supported since I wanted to make sure.. here is what it says..

Why Serial ATA II 3.0Gb/s?
three important features:
3.0 Gb/s (300 MB/s) interface data rate
NCQ (native command queuing)
Staggered (delayed) spin-up
The 7K80 provides all of these enhancements to enable faster data access and better power management to the system.

Pros: Fast SATA drive for cheap.

Cons: Rumor is these drives fail. But that’s any hard disk.

Overall Review: May buy another.