If you’ve gone to your local computer or other retail stores, you might have noticed that you don’t really see that many Hitachi hard drives available for the consumer compared with big names such as Maxtor and Western Digital.  A representative at Hitachi informed me that you should be able to see their drives soon since they have partnered with retail stores such as CompUSA and Fry’s Electronics to sell their drives.  In fact, I actually saw several Hitachi drives at my local CompUSA.

Here is what Hitachi had to say about moving into the consumer market:

“Hitachi entered the retail market in late December 2003 with a small quantity of drives to test out the space. We are moving more and more into the retail channel using our distribution partners' existing relationships with them and plan to expand into additional retailers in 4Q and throughout 2005.  As we bring up more retailers, you will see a larger presence in this space.”
 

The box of the drive has a design with its main colors of red and white.  The front of the box shows the platters of a hard drive.  Although the box is a bit generic since it doesn’t mention the drive capacity or other specifications/features, the actual retail box in the stores should contain that information.

Inside the box, I found the drive well packaged.  The drive was held in between two plastic placeholders to absorb impact of the box and to prevent accidental damage.  The drive was contained in a gray anti-static bag.  There was an extra Serial ATA cable provided just in case you don’t have one.  Although this is a minimum package, it would have been nice if screws were included.
 

I have been talking about Serial ATA all this time, but before you can use it, you need to know the requirements.  Basically you have two options.  You can either purchase a newer motherboard that supports the Serial ATA technology, or you can purchase an add-in card which allows you to plug in a Serial ATA hard drive into it.

In order to install the drive, all I had to do was place the drive in the appropriate place in my computer case.  I secured it in my computer case with screws.  Then I used the Serial ATA cable; one end goes onto the motherboard or card, and the other goes to the hard drive.  You really can’t go wrong when plugging in the cable because the connector has an L-shape which only allows you to connect it one way.  Then you just plug one of your ATX power supply connectors to the hard drive to provide power.  There are no jumpers to set on the drive because there isn’t any.

Since my previous primary hard drive was a 120GB Western Digital ATA 100 drive with Windows XP installed on it, I wanted my computer to boot on the new Hitachi drive.  In order to do that, I set my Western Digital drive as a slave drive.  Then I installed a fresh copy of Windows XP on the Hitachi drive using a bootable Windows XP CD.  After the installation, Windows XP was able to boot on the new drive.  It was simple as that!
 

First off, I started off with Sisoft Sandra 2004 Professional.

Based on the bar graph, you can tell that the Hitachi 7K400 performed well above ATA100 drives as expected.  In addition, it outperformed a standard SATA150 120GB drive at 7200RPM.  The benchmark recorded a buffered read of 118MB/s, a random read of 9MB/s, a sequential write of 53MB/s, and a random access time of 6ms.  This benchmark gives us the first impression that this drive is performing well.

Next, I used the HDTach benchmark to test more real world speeds.  In Sisoft Sandra, it recorded a sequential read speed of 53MB/s.  HDTach confirms this number with an average sequential read speed of 48MB/s.  In addition, the drive shows to have a burst speed of 126.9MB/s.  When using the HDTach benchmark to compare the performance of the 7K400 against its database, I found that the 7K400 performed slightly above similar SATA drives offered by Maxtor, Seagate, and Western Digital.  The drive had a CPU utilization of 3% and an access time of 12ms, which was about double what was predicted in Sisoft.

After all this testing, the question is, “What can you really expect by using SATA technology?”  Having used the drive for gaming, file transfers, extractions, etc., I found the drive to be generally faster than my older 120GB 7200RPM ATA 100 Western Digital hard drive. I especially noticed the difference when extracting large files from a single zip file.  It was able to extract the files at a faster rate.  Games loaded a bit faster than usual.  What really made the difference was when I was working with multiple running applications at the same time.  While extracting files or playing a game, it took less effort to open up other programs.