Hitachi Deskstar 7K400

The Hitachi 7K400 is the only hard disk on test to use a whopping five platters and ten read/write heads.

At 80GB per platter, it's nothing to write home about these days, but to fit five platters in a 26mm-high package is a great feat of engineering. However, this does lead to more heat, more power consumption and more noise.

In our tests, the 7K400 produced 34.5dBA when seeking. It also became much warmer than the other disks (notably the ExcelStor) when running our taxing file-copy tests. On a performance note, the Hitachi proved a disappointment, managing an average STR of only 47.9MB/sec, despite the second-fastest seek time on test. In Photoshop, it was the second-slowest disk, taking 139 seconds to complete the test. A surprise was the boot time of 26.3 seconds - the second fastest we saw without a RAID configuration.

For transferring large files, it was the slowest overall internal disk. Reading small files also caused the 7K400 to sweat, but writing them was less of a problem - it was above average here at 7.5MB/sec.

When it comes to value, you'd be forgiven for thinking higher capacities would lead to a lower cost per GB. But this isn't the case with either the Hitachi or the Seagate 7200.8, as both cost about 50p per GB. When you consider that it's a risk to entrust 400GB of data to a single disk and it's cheaper to buy two faster Maxtor 200GB disks, there's little reason to opt for the 7K400.