Hitachi GST Ultrastar A7K1000 HUA721010KLA330 (0A35772) 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5″ Hard Drive Bare Drive

Pros: Have not installed yet

Cons: Newegg could have aforded a better packing job. 2 sets of 2 drives slammed together and wraped with bubble wrap. How about some foam with dividers. Worst pack job ever. Bags had holes in them from the sharp parts of the other drives which means they banged up against each other. Hope they work. Newegg needs to work on their packing!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Pros: This hard drive is very nice in a way that it offers so much space, and performance within one hard drive. It’s also quite and offers enough flexibility to last me a long time. I own many Hitachi/IBM drives and it often seems that go obsolete before they ever break (that’s a good thing).

Cons: Price, I bought this when it was $399. The capacity of the drive shows up as 1,000,202,039,296 Bytes/931GB in Windows Vista Ultimate. Hitachi always has used the SI standard of estimating a terabyte, thus figuring it smaller than the traditional and binary arithmetic of 1,099,511,627,776 bytes = 10244. It would be nice if they would actually calculate their drives traditionally so that we can get more bang for our buck! However, this is something I knew before I purchased this drive.

Overall Review: This hard drive rates a 5.9 out of 6 in Windows Vista, which is excellent. I have a Hitachi 500Gb drive and it only rates a 5.7 out of 6. So this drive really does perform well.

Pros: Works fine in an Antec USB enclosure. 5 year warranty.

Cons: None yet.

Overall Review: No industry standard SMART raw values.

Pros: None that I know of

Cons: The drive I got was built over 8 years ago – well beyond any warranty.

Overall Review: Stay away from this one – NO WARRANTY!

Pros: Max volume. 124.5 MB/s in a 2 drive RAID 0 per hdtach.

Cons: I wanted to upgrade to a 4 drive RAID 5 so I bought 2 new, identical drives. I am attempting to zero the old drives with their utilities.
It is ~1/60th done after 7 hours. It allegedly writes at 50+ MB/second but is now writing zeros at 0.66 MB/second or 75.5 times slower than advertised. At this rate, it will take 17.5 days to complete a single drive or 35 days for both. Aye Carumba!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Overall Review: If hitachi thinks I am going to wait 35 days to zero these drives, they are nutty as a fruit cake. I will RMA them tomorrow if I don’t get a better solution from them. Egad!!!

Pros: Running 6 of these drives in Raid1. Perfect performance, TONS of storage, already filled one up, but they pump alotta heat. Put 3 fans in case to vent the air.

Cons: None found so far….

Overall Review: A must buy for Bit Torrent downloaders.

Pros: These drives are the commercial version of the Deskstar drives. This means they have heavier duty parts (cooling, circuitry, bearings, etc.). I deal in network storage, and have tested a few different drives. These drives were consistently better than it’s competitors. I don’t know why the person writing a review prior to mine said he is having so much trouble, but maybe he should get with the times and try a RAID configuration that is not obsolete for the exact reasons he described as his trouble, and maybe go with a 0+1 configuration. We found these drives were considerably faster at setting up RAID, and retrieving data. Also, I have not had 1 drive fail on me yet, and we put these drives through absolute hell!

Cons: Would be nice if Hitachi would release their 1.25 TB drives or larger.

Overall Review: If your using these drives in an environment that is going to be constantly writing and retrieving from the hard disks (such as an IT department), then these drives are a terrific choice. However, they are a little bit more pricey than the other 1 TB disks out there. So if you just need them for home use or work environments that are not constantly using the disks, then you may want to consider one of the cheaper drives out there (Seagate, WD, Hitachi Deskstars, etc.).