1TB SATA HDDs!

Hitachi A7K1000

Hitachi's second 1TB drive is their A7K1000.  The basic difference between this drive and the 7K1000 is its toughened specifications, all intended for maximum performance and reliability in enterprise environments.  In fact, the A7K1000 falls under the "UltraStar" family, previously populated with Hitachi's high-end SCSI drives only. 

Here are the manufacturer-supplied specifications:

The A7K1000 pretty much has the same physical specs as the 7K1000.  Whatever changes Hitachi made in creating the A7K1000, the result is increased reliability as shown in the specs above.  24 x 7 operation and 1.2M hours MTBF are reassuring to those that would store valuable data on these drives.  Hopefully, such changes did not tremendously inhibit performance.

On to the results...

HD Tach 3.0.1.0, 8MB Zones

HD Tach 3.0.1.0, 32MB Zones

ATTO Disk Benchmark

The A7K1000 is definitely designed for enterprise and RAID applications.  With RAID, more storage and security can be attained through specific array setups.  So let's put a pair of A7K1000 drives in RAID-0 and RAID-1 arrays, and see what sort of results we get.  RAID card used is the Areca ARC-1680.

RAID-0:  HD Tach 3.0.1.0, 8MB Zones

RAID-0:  HD Tach 3.0.1.0, 32MB Zones

RAID-0: ATTO Disk Benchmark

For RAID-0, we see a near-doubling of read speeds and write speeds, except when the RAID controller obviously caches the data.  The A7K1000 performs well with hardware RAID controllers.

RAID-1:  HD Tach 3.0.1.0, 8MB Zones

RAID-1:  HD Tach 3.0.1.0, 32MB Zones

RAID-1: ATTO Disk Benchmark

The RAID-1 results show more of what the A7K1000 does not do - hamper the RAID controller's performance in mirroring reads and writes.  Although not doubled, reads and writes did not decrease from single-drive performance.  Impressive.