2.5”: Hitachi Ultrastar C10K300 (10,000 RPM, 300GB)

Hitachi throws its hat in the 2.5” enterprise hard drive ring with the 300GB C10K300. There’s also a C15K147, which we did not receive for this review. The latter still utilizes 3 Gb/s SAS, while the C10K300 steps up to 6 Gb/s SAS.

While our two Fujitsu drives didn’t demonstrate a bandwidth advantage for the faster interface, Hitachi manages to reach the highest interface bandwidth in this test at 341 MB/s. Keep in mind that this an interface speed, meaning it applies to activity between the system and the drive’s 64MB cache memory. The 7.1 ms average access time is an average result for 2.5” 10,000 RPM drives. The Ultrastar C10K300 can outperform the Fujitsu MBD2300RC and Seagate Savvio 10K.3 in different I/O benchmarks, but there is no clear winner here, unlike in the PCMark Vantage application test.

Unfortunately, Hitachi’s 6.4W idle power seems high compared to its two direct competitors, but Hitachi does well in limiting power consumption in some situations, such as full HD video playback. Only the Savvio 10K.3 and 7,200 RPM drives are more efficient in this application. Hitachi’s peak power consumption never exceeds 6.9W, but this still lands it in the bottom ranks of our efficiency tests. The drive is solid, but it only ekes out wins over its competitors in certain tests, such as PCMark and some I/O benchmarks.

Throughput Diagram