Customer Reviews

Hitachi Deskstar 3.5" 2TB 7200RPM SATA II 32MB Cache Internal Hard Drive 0S00164

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

I built a Linux Raid Server using 4 - 2tb Hitachi HD32000 Hard Drives in Raid 5 configuration. I then used two Seagate 250gb in Raid 1 for the Linux OS. This setup works great. I wanted to use the Seagate 1.5tb but there are problems with the firmware and Raid 5 configurations. The Hitachi's on the other hand have worked perfectly. I would recommend this to anyone building a solid Raid 5 setup looking for the best combination perfomance & value per tb.

This drive is a latecomer in the 2TB arena and doesn't have many reviews, but it is a well loved contender.

I put several of these in a Drobo Raid Enclosure and they work extremely well, maxing out the claimed read/write speeds of the enclosure. This drive is the only affordable 7200rpm 2TB drive. They also start up quickly; when you've got four of them in one enclosure, this really matters. Because of this, a lot of people buy these for raids.

The green drives are popular, but the WD and Seagates seem to have a lot of trouble running in raid configurations without flashing the firmware. They can have varying RPMs from eachother set at the factory, not good at all.

Hitachi's are a bit noisy, my only complaint. But a nice throaty sound at least.

Be sure to look up the firmware in your enclosure or desktop and make sure that it fits a drive this modern and large.

I have just purchased this drive and it produces more noise when accessing data randomly than my 3 case fans plus CPU fan plus video card fan plus my other 3 HD's TOGETHER. What's worse, Hitachi simply removed the option to alter the AAM (Automatic Acoustic Management) parameters from their Feature Tool utility since its version 2.13.

If anybody else was unfortunate enough to purchase this drive, here's the solution: get the freeware utility WinAAM or the more sophisticated HD Tune (not freeware), boot the system with the HD set to IDE mode in the BIOS (AAM can't be altered in SATA/AHCI/RAID mode) and set the AAM value to 128. There will be NO noticeable performance penalty (I did A LOT of testing with HD Tach) and the absurd noise will disappear.

I tried contacting Hitachi's support about this but they didn't seem to even bother reading my message and sent me a standard copy and paste reply. This will be my first and last Hitachi hard drive EVER.

I use this drive on my Drobo enclosure, together with Seagate and Western Digital models.

I found that this Hitachi drive runs hotter and noiser than Seagate and WD models,

so I cannot recommend it if you're concerned about temperature or noise level.

Go for the WD Green models instead.

Pros: cheap, 7200K rpm, faster than green models

Cons: noisy, runs hot

I'm a 55 year old woman with a phobia about cracking open my computer case, but reading the reviews here gave me the courage to give it a try.

The item came very well packaged, and the instructions seemed quite straightforward. I opened the case on my Dell XPS, and in 5 minutes, I had connected the hard drive and had it nestled safely in place.

Then came the fun part. I restarted my computer, and the drive did not show up under MY COMPUTER. My operating system is Windows Vista Ultimate. I did some searching around on my Help files, and decided to open the Computer Management program, Disk Management. It loaded my disk configuration information, and detected the hard drive. I attempted a slow format, which took many hours, and hung at 54%. I restarted the computer and tried a quick format. Got an error message that it could not be done. Tried another slow format, which took many hours and hung at 54% again. That took 15 hours so far. I called Hitachi, and they told me to download and run their diagnostic program. That took another 12 hours, and showed no problems at all with the hard drive unit.

I tried to format the drive again using Computer Management and failed. So I did a little digging on the internet and found that there are a lot of freeware disk management programs out there. I chose one that had decent reviews on the web, called Easeus Partition Master Home Edition. It was very easy to understand and a minute later I had done a quick format and I was up and running. I don't know if this was a good solution to my problem, but so far my hard drive is operating flawlessly.

The reason I am giving this 4 stars instead of five is not because of the difficulty in formatting, I'm putting the blame for that on Windows. This hard drive is quite noisy. It bothered me for about the first two weeks, and now I have learned to tune it out. The tools I downloaded from Hitachi do not have the program for noise management anymore, apparently.

I am thrilled to have this extra 2TB for all of my Camera Raw files. I've taken over 18,000 RAW images in the last year and I do a lot of Photoshop work on them, I have external drives for backups, and now I have the HD space to play at my heart's content.

I admit that when I could not format the drive, I first suspected that it was the fault of the Hitachi hardware, when I called Hitachi for service they answered quickly, were polite and helpful, and told me that if the diagnostic program showed anything wrong they would be happy to make good on the item. (Purchased from Amazon)

Final thoughts: If I can get this thing installed and running, anyone can.

I bought this drive as a medium for my system backups. It worked fine while it worked and then failed without warning after ~9 months. So much for my backups!

Most of the time the drive is not recognized by the BIOS. When it is, it returns assorted, inconsistent S.M.A.R.T. errors. I've returned it to Hitachi for replacement under warranty. The RMA and return shipping requirements were worse than any I've ever dealt with before with Seagate, Maxtor or Western Digital. It remains to be seen if/what they replace it with and how long that will last. Next drive I buy isn't likely to be a Hitachi.

I was kind of disappointed with these hard drives. I was expecting more performance out of them considering the price. I got them to be raided inside of my NetGear NAS Duo. The NAS may be part of the problem, but I don't think so as many reviewers who have my slower speeds complain that it's a hard drive function about 85% of the time. That and they are louder than anticipated. Now some of this is due to the NAS for sure, but I even pulled them out and popped them into my music creation PC tower to test. Sure enough, while the noise was reduced in the absence of the NAS, they were still noticeably loud. On the plus side, they are some of the best and most reliable drives you'll find in the 2Tb category for this price. Of course, I say this and in a year we'll see 4-10 Tb drives at about the same level.

Bottom Line: Good drives, but not the best you could get. Perfect for straight network storage as long as you don't mind non-blistering transfer speeds.

I received the drives in the mail today and am already up and running. Two things;

1. They are quiet, no loud noises as in the prior reviews.

2. They did not come in retail packaging so there were no cables of any kind with the drives, no documentation, nada, just the drives.

It can get extremely hot when running. Have to use an external fan to cool it down by blowing directly onto hard drives. I own two of them. I used to like Hitachi because of its reliability and minimum heat. Doesn't look like a good buy anymore.

I used to work in a lab that dealt with thousands of drives from all manufacturers. I had to replace a drive just about every day, but the only brand to *only rarely* fail was Hitachi. Since then I have been buying Hitachi drives for my Drobo Pro Media center at home, and have never seen a problem at all. Performance is great, they are quiet and reliable.