Hitachi's release of the 1 TB 6leskstar 7KI000.B is a perfect blend of performance, space and efficiency. Best suited for HTPC environments, the hard drive has multiple benefits-it saves on power, profits from a high capacity, and is very silent.

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Hitachi's 7KI000 drive family has a new three-platter design which means a massive 333 GB is stored on each platter. The drive supports Native Command Queuing and has an internal buffer of 16 MB. The capacity of the drive cannot be determined directly by the model number and can be confusing to a new buyer. The model number of Hitachi hard drives, in this case HDT7210l0SLA360, can be read in this system to find out the complete specifications of the hard drive - HOT (Hitachi Deskstar T-series), 72 (Spindle speed: 7,200 RPM), 10 (Max capacity: 1 TB), 10 (Actual capacity: 1 TB), S (Hard drive generation), L (Drive height: 26.1 mm), 3 (Interface speed: SATA 300) and finally 6 (Buffer cache capacity: 16 MB), while the rest are unique codes.

We put the drive to test with a 2 GB RAM drive and transferred data amounting to 2 GB in both single and multiple files. Single files were read and written at speeds of 57 MB/s and 72 MB/s respectively, whereas multiple files were transferred at 61 MB/s and 78 MB/s respectively. The throughput results were just a tad lower than the Raptor 150 GB (10,000 RPM) hard drive from Western Digital.