Hitachi Deskstar

Well, our new Gateway computer is coming with a couple of Hitachi Deskstar 7K500 drives. Reviews have been overwhelmingly positive for single user environments:
Storage Review: Hitachi has made the transition to a native SATA design and a 16-megabyte buffer with aplomb. Though the Deskstar 7K500 lags a bit in the density department and as a result must assemble five platters to hit the half-terabyte mark, the ultimate proof is in the pudding. When it comes to single-user applications, whether productivity, video- and sound-editing, or games, the 7K500 is easily the fastest 7200 RPM SATA drive one can buy. In all five of our non-server tests, the Deskstar bests the Western Digital Caviar RE2, a drive that just a few weeks ago enjoyed its own run at blowing away the opposition.
BigBruin: The Hitachi Deskstar 7K500 500GB SATA-II hard drive raises the bar for those who subscribe to the theory that bigger is better. When it comes to hard drives; more speed, more capacity, and more cache memory is always a good thing. This is the first drive to come across our test bench with SATA300 speed, and it provides the largest capacity (500GB) and most cache memory (16MB) that we have seen to date. Browse around… 500GB and 16MB are currently the best you will find in an internal hard drive, in these respective categories.
TechReport: And remember, the Deskstar 7K500 is more than just 500GB of storage capacity. It also has everything one should expect from a high-end drive, including support for 300MB/s Serial ATA transfer rates and Native Command Queuing, a hefty 16MB cache, and a three-year warranty. None of those features go above and beyond the call of duty, but they don't disappoint, either. Neither does the 7K500's performance, for the most part. The Deskstar scores well in desktop application benchmarks and file copy tests, but slow boot times and a poor showing in three of four IOMeter test patterns make it difficult to recommend the drive across the board. Poor performance with IOMeter's file server, workstation, and database access patterns suggests that the Deskstar is inappropriate for multi-user environments with heavy read and write demands.
Tom's Hardware: When it comes to maximum drive capacity, the DeskStar 7K500 can help to reduce the number of drives you have to install, such as when using compact RAID array storage with a capacity in the teraByte range. It's thus clear that storage densities in rack-mounted servers will start hitting new records almost immediately. For desktop use, the massive 500 GB of capacity will be a Godsend for many users.

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