An old server drive of mine. These are exceedingly well built and have a particularly high standard of reliability, at least in my personal experiences with them. This was in the era of power supply manufacturers slowly switching to having SATA power connectors as standard, as opposed to simply molex. It was quite common to see drives from this period with both inputs as an option.
Drive Attributes ------------------------------------- Hitachi Deskstar T7K250 HDT722520DLA380 ------------------------------------- Capacity 200GB Mfc Date 2006-11 Interface SATA Platters 2 Heads 4 RPM 7200 Protocol Serial-ATA/300 -------------------------------------
For the fellow hard drive aficionados out there, it’s quite obvious where this drives design stems from. This being, from the early days of the Hitachi-IBM takeover deal. After the mass failure of the 75GXP, Hitachi really stepped up their game, to bring the Deskstar brand back into a state of solid reputation. Whether or not they reached this goal is quite subjective, since many people I knew at least still didn’t trust them, but personally they’ve been some of my most reliable drives of all time.
This one is no exception. It has just over 40k hours and I don’t expect it to fail anytime soon. I retired this drive many years ago from 24/7 operation, but it has been used for a few oddball uses, such as in game consoles, since that time.
Front labels remain dedicatedly identical to IBM’s original design. It’s a phenomenal layout, as usual.
A relatively standard IBM/Hitachi backside we’re all used to. The one thing I would add to this drive, is the incredible heft this thing has. These have a very impressively high standard build quality vibe.
From a first glance, it doesn’t look like Hitachi did any huge changes to the outside, but this isn’t the case when dealing with the PCB design. A single IC by Infineon is the central processor for these drives. This isn’t much different from later IBM drives, but the individual IBM-branded IC’s had been made redundant at this point, or absorbed into the main controller IC. Either way, the layout isn’t a huge diversion from the original IBM-designed PCB’s, but demonstrates Hitachi did at least do something.
It’s a good drive. I can’t add anything else to that.
Here’s a few files, for the curious:
Hitachi Deskstar T7K250 Product Manual (pdf)
Hitachi Deskstar T7K250 Drive Specifications (pdf)
If you missed the video I made on this drive, you can find it here: