Introduction

You may know Hitachi Global Storage Technology (GST) was recently acquired by Western Digital Corporation. That isn't stopping Hitachi GST from moving forward with their production of new products. In fact, since the acquisition, HGST has released a number of products under their own branding.

Two such products, one of which we're looking at today, is the new 4TB capacity internal disk drives. The new Deskstar 7K4000 and 5K4000 drives increase storage capacity for a single 3.5" form factor from 3TB to an astonishing 4TB. If you thought 3TB was big, then add one more to it and call it massive.

Today we're looking at the 5K4000 model, a 5,900 RPM platter design that was designed for cool and quite operation. Hitachi GST's 7K4000 is the 7,200 RPM model with lower access times and a little faster sequential performance. The 5K4000 we're looking at today is primarily for storing large amounts of user data in a second tier, i.e. not the operating system boot drive.

With solid-state technology quickly taking over the boot drive market, tiered storage is quickly gaining appeal for consumers and especially enthusiasts. SSD's offer very good performance, but lack capacity for a large amount of files. In desktop systems where the physical size of the computer allows for multiple drives, we feel tiered storage is a better option for consumers looking to retail a large amount of data and keep the system performance at a fast pace.