Hitachi Deskstar 7K250 Review - Power and Jumpers
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Looking at the back of the drive, we can see two power outlets. One is the standard 4 pin "molex" connector we are all used to seeing. The other is the new SATA power port, which can be used to make the drive "hot pluggable." This allows you to add the hard drive to the system without turning it off. While this is of little use to the average home PC, it's a necessity for servers and enterprise users. Most new power supplies carry this extra connector.
If you are wondering where the jumpers are to change the mode of the drive, don’t; there aren't any. Remember, SATA only allows one drive per channel, therefore always making a connected device the master. No more need for trying to figure out whether the drive is a master or slave. Looking at the top and bottom of the drive, it carries the standard features of older IBM DeskStars. The command cable is uncovered, and leaves all the chips on the PCB exposed. Once you install the drive this doesn't really matter of course, unless you plan to have loose objects running around in it. In the process of installing the drive, however, you should be careful to not impale any of these components with your screwdriver.
Testing
For this review, we changed up from our normal benchmark suite to one more geared towards testing desktop HD performance. I tried to add in as many real world tests as possible.
Test System
- Sempron 3100+
- DFI LanpartyUT nF3250Gb
- Kingston HyperX 3000 (2x512MB)
- ATI Radeon 8500 LE
- IBM 120GXP 60GB ATA-100
- Hitachi 7k250 80GB SATA-150
For this, both drives were attached to the onboard Marvell SATA controller. The IBM drive used an ABIT Serillel adapter in order for both to be attached to the same device, instead of one to PATA and the other to the SATA bus. Each was formatted prior to each test.
Next: Winbench '99 >>
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