HITACHI HDS721050CLA362 – RELIABLE AND AFFORDABLE

General characteristics:

• Brand (Manufacturer): Hitachi
• Model: HDS721050CLA362
• Capacity: 500GB
• Interface: Serial ATA-300
• Spin speed: 7200rpm
• Date: Dec – 2012
• Country: China
• Price 40-50€

Hitachi HDS721050CLA362 has shown to be a good choise for home users that are looking for high-capacity hard drives for storing big files like photos, videos or music. Business users can use this model for RAID array where it’s above average in its class thanks to the speed performance.

The users say this hard disk is offering equal reading and writting speed regarding the other drives with the same capacity and the producer specifies power efficiency as an advantage.

TEST: READING

TEST: WRITTING

In our case, both tests show LBA zone stability. There are no too big oscillationsduring the hard disk reading and writting which directly indicates consistency of the media quality.

Transfer tests on 1000MB i 4000MB show almost equal results with about 10% difference. When comes to sequential reading and writting, speed is the highest and it represents the avarage of the class. Time of access ie. reading and writting random* blocks of 512KB, 4KB, 4KB QD32 (Queue Depth = simultaneous request for 32 different operations, reading and writting) is significantly lower which has been expected.

* Sequential access is access to adjacent sectors (the heads don’t have to move when/during writting) while random means acces to not adjacent sectors ie. there is the seek time while the heads are being positioned from one sector to another.

• Advantages: Affordable price, capacity big enough (suitable) for average user.
• Disadvantages: Average speed, not for demanding userswho are looking for maximal system performances.
• Conclusion: As we have stated in the headline – affordable and reliable hard disk drive which will satisfy needs of the majority of the users.