Hard disk

New Hard Disk Drives with 1 TB and 2 TB Storage Capacities
This new roundup will discuss the latest hard disk drive modes with 1 TB and 2 TB storage capacities. We will talk about ten new solutionsfrom Hitachi, Samsung, Seagate and Western Digital. We are going to digress from our tradition of comparing hard disk drives of the same capacity within a single review. Not long ago we wrote about1-terabyte and then about 2-terabyte HDDs, so we already know HDDs of these capacities well enough. But as is often the case, soon after those reviews we came across a number of interesting products.They are too few, however, for us to write two independent reviews, but we do want to tell you about them. That’s why there are both 1- and 2-terabyte HDDs in this article.
Testing ParticipantsHitachi Deskstar 7K1000.C: HDS721010CLA332, 1 TB



Our list of new and interesting HDDs begins with the latest generation of Hitachi’s products. We discussed one model from it in our recent roundup of1TB drives, so what is so exciting about this one? The fact is Hitachi’s basic firmware for its latest generation of HDDs (both 7K1000.C and 7K2000 series) had proved to be rather poor but thecompany must be given credit for quickly releasing an update and the HDD in our last review had the improved firmware (version 39C) rather than the basic one (version 25C). Alas, the update was notblameless, either. Recently, we have got a sample with firmware 3EA which proves to be very different from the basic firmware. Thus, we will have the opportunity to see what effect firmware may have on anHDD’s performance and will also give the Deskstar 7K1000.C the chance to improve our opinion of it.
Samsung EcoGreen F3: HD203WI, 1 TB

Next goes Samsung’s 2TB drive with 32MB cache from the 5400RPMEcoGreen F3 series. This HDD is interesting for two reasons. First, it is the company’s first 4-platter HDD. It is an achievement, really. Samsung’s previous-generation HDDs used to be always...