That's extraordinarily quiet and for comparison let's look at a performance king, the Western Digital Raptor 150, which has an average seek noise level of 36dBA. The current leader in capacity, the Seagate Barracuda 7200.10, is rated at 37dBA so it's clear that the Hitachi is very, very quiet. But how does its performance compare?

The synthetic HD Tach 3 test shows impressive results that are comparable with the WD Raptor 150 and so too does the HDD element of PCMark05.

HDTach test

Burst/write/read speed tests: longer bars are better
Random access time test: shorter bars are better

PCMark05 HDD test

Longer bars are better

A simple data-transfer test using 4GB of movie files was less conclusive as the Hitachi seemed to be somewhat slower than the Seagate 7200.10 750GB. Writing files to the 7K1000 was very fast but a long sustained read started very briskly for the first couple of gigabytes although it then slowed down quite noticeably towards the end.

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4GB read/write test

Values in seconds. Shorter bars are better

Verdict

We were very impressed with the Hitachi 7K1000. It's exceptionally quiet yet it delivers top-notch performance at a very reasonable price. We have no idea how you're supposed to back up a drive of this capacity, but that's hardly Hitachi's problem.

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