Hitachi Deskstar 5K3000 2 TB

Internal Hard Drive Reviews

Hitachi has updated its range of internal hard drives with two new series of HDD: the Deskstar 5K3000 and 7K3000. The 5K3000 are mid-range hard drives with a spin speed of 5700 to 5940 rpm, depending on whether you pick the 1.5 TB, 2 TB or 3 TB model (see sidebar). Today, we'll be taking a look at the 2 TB 5K3000 (HDS5C3020ALA632). The drive connects to a motherboard via the SATA-3 interface, allowing theoretical maximum data transfer speeds of 6 Gbps. It also has just 32 MB of cache memory, compared with 64 MB for the high-end Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000 series. Remember that unlike the hard drive's overall score, its rating in this section is based on a comparison been all the drives we've ever tested, including SSDs. This can help explain surprisingly low scores. However, although it's technically a mid-range hard drive, the 5K3000 still manages to get two stars, like the high-performance Hitachi 7K3000 and WD Caviar Black. In fact, the first tests show the kind of results you wouldn't normally expect from a mid-priced HDD: The 5K3000 smashes its way through the scores obtained by drives we thought would be its direct rivals (WD Caviar Green, Seagate Barracuda LP, etc.).