U320 SCSI HDD ROUNDUP

Hitachi Ultrastar 15K147

Hitachi purchased IBM's hard disk business unit several years ago, along with some of its problems (75GXP fiasco) as well as its successful R&D department.  Hitachi's claim to recent fame was its launch of the world's first 500GB drive - the 7K500.  However, its SCSI drives were not as popular.  Below we have the Ultrastar 15K147, their 15k RPM SCSI drive.   

Click on the logo above to view the Ultrastar webpage at the Hitachi website.

HD Tach 3.0.1.0 RW, 8MB Zones: Burst: 232.4 MB/s, Ave. Read: 79.3 MB/s, Ave. Write: 67.9 MB/s, Random Access: 6.4 ms, CPU: 1%

HD Tach 3.0.1.0 RW, 32MB Zones: Burst: 232.6 MB/s, Ave. Read: 79.3 MB/s, Ave. Write: 75.7 MB/s, Random Access: 6.4 ms, CPU: 1%

HD Tach 3.0.1.0 RW, Variable Zones: Burst: 232.6 MB/s, Ave. Read: 79.4 MB/s, Ave. Write: 79.0 MB/s, Random Access: 6.0 ms, CPU: 1%

In the ATTO chart  below, the 15K147 showed very good read speeds, but the writes lagged behind in the smallest data sizes.

The 2-drive RAID_0 Host Raid test showed an 84% increase in writes and an impressive 100% increase in reads:

In RAID_1, performance was slightly inconsistent.  Performance was approximately the same as a single drive.