The Deskstar is expected to have light use while the Ultrastar works in an always-on environment. This boils down to some amazingly specific figures. The Deskstar is expected to work for 3996 hours per year - that's 11 hours a day - while Ultrastar works for 8760 hours in a year or, presumably, 8784 in a leap year.
The non-recoverable error rate is ten times better for Ultrastar than for Deskstar.
Hitachi Ultrastar A7K2000
Click for full-size image
One figure we can easily understand is that the warranty for Deskstar is three years. The Ultrastar, however, gets a whopping five-year warranty. You have to wonder about the value of that extended warranty as current trends suggest that a replacement 2TB drive will be worth pennies by 2014.
And, as it happens, WD offers a five-year warranty on its desktop Caviar Black drives.
We tested the Ultrastar using a Core i7-based PC running Windows 7 Professional. We also dragged the 2TB WD Caviar Black out of the cupboard for some back-to-back tests.
The classic synthetic HD Tach 3 benchmark test shows the Ultrastar in a good light with an average read speed that nearly matches the Caviar Black and an average write speed that is faster than the WD drive.
CrystalDiskMark delivered more nuanced results, with a gap opening up in the three read tests that show the Hitachi to be slower than the WD. On the write side of things, the Ultrastar holds up its end in the sequential write test but in the 512KB and 4KB tests it falls behind significantly.
WD Caviar Black
Click for full-size image
Iometer shows the Hitachi drive is ten per cent slower in Read IOPS than the WD and five per cent faster in Write IOPS.
Next page: Test Results
COMMENTS
@Kevin Fairhurst
To be fair, the deathstar era was a very long time ago now, and since then the drives have been fairly good.
I'm currently running 13 HDs in my various PCs at home, 10 of which are HGST, and they're the most reliable of the lot. I've even got a deathstar in my xbox (which did fail, but has since had the firmware upgrage) and even that's still going strong.
6 of these are in my home server, which is on 24/7. 4 are in a RAID array, and SMART says they've currently been powered up for something like 1.8 years. (16153 hours), can't praise them highly enough.
No MTBF rating? No surprise!
On the DeathStar, that is!
FAIL icon, as, well, it's apt for those drives, you know...
@Steven Jones - More pedantry
"people mistake MTBF figures for average lifetime of disks - very, very different things"
Given that
MTBF = mean time before failure.
Failure = end of life
mean = sum of samples / number of samples = what most recognise as the average (rather than median or mode)
Unless you are asserting that failure does not eol the device, I fail to see what mistake people are making. Or are you suggesting that mtbf values are calculated/extrapolated rather than measured and therefore wrong...
40GB and 64GB SSDNowV
If you refer to our review of the 40GB Kingston SSD you'll see that performance was lower than the 128GB SSDNowV that we previously reviewed. We speculated that this is a result of the 40GB using five memory chips which doesn't take full advantage of the ten channel memory controller.
So yes, your 64GB drive is very likely faster than the 40GB.
Re:Gibi not Giga
Respect for the pedantry. If you can't be pedantic here, where can you?
