I can still fondly remember the first beige box I called my very own. It was an x286 based machine that smoked at an incredible 12 MHz after pressing the turbo switch. Multimedia was handled by an Ad Lib sound card and an EGA graphics card. It didn't have an optical drive but it did have a pair of disk drives; a 5.25" 1.2 megabyte floppy and the cutting edge 3.5" 1.44 megabyte drive. For a hard drive, I had the biggest that was available at the time I made my purchase A 20 Megabyte Seagate that earned me a lot of sarcasm from my friends. Yes, I can still remember Bill and Neil hounding me with "Why did you get something that big, you'll never fill it up?"

      In the greater scheme of things, we don't expect a single computer part, let alone an entire build, to last more than a few years. So it's not fair to compare and contrast the size of the Windows folder of say Vista Ultimate (12.8 Gigabytes) or even Windows XP (3.99 Gigabytes) to the size of a now ancient hard drive. It sure is hard to believe that at one time, a 20 megabyte hard drive was the biggest in the bunch. It wasn't only big in the storage department, but also in the amount of physical room needed to mount it -- a 5.25" full height drive bay. For all but optical drives, those days are long gone.......

     Let's fast forward to the now where the Terabyte mark has recently been reached with a single drive. Here we have Hitachi's model the Deskstar 7K1000, but you'll have to excuse us if we don't break a bottle of champagne on its chassis to christen it. The retail box is wrapped with a quick run down of approximately how much you can store on its platters, taking the average size of songs, movies, video clips, pictures and of course, games!

     Now that we have it, what do we do with it? Does it have the performance to sit in our PC as the sole hard drive? That's what we're going to look at over the next few benchmarks. But first, we need to look a the drives specifications. Sure, we know it's big - but what else? How about a 3-year warranty for starters! Hitachi has taken over the Deskstar line from IBM and has recovered nicely from the 75GXP Deathstar disaster. Hitachi returned the reliability and performance standards we came to know and respect from the Deskstar line, all the while keeping the drives competitively priced. Tech support is just a phone call, e-mail, or web based live-chat away.

     The SATA interface and 7200 RPM spindle speed are pretty much standard these days on a desktop drive. What separates this drive from others, besides its huge capacity, is the 32 megabyte on-board buffer. That's right, double the size of other standard desktop SATA drives which should result in some amazing burst read-speed benchmarks. Let's add perpendicular recording technology which directly effects our storage capacity and Fluid Dynamic Bearings that will keep the drive whisper quiet.

     The 7K1000 has the ability to manage its own power efficiency which has a direct impact on keeping its thermal output under control. The above chart shows the units four levels of power usage. When the unit experiences intervals of idle use, the controller automatically beings shifting things such as the spindle speed and head parking to conserve energy and thus heat. This is much different than an operating systems power management which would completely shut off the hard drive which would of course, require a complete spin-up cycle which adds time to data access.