Hard Drive storage has come a long way since the days of 5,400rpm ATA33 2MB cache drives. Today, drives have increased in spindle speed, cache size, and interface capability. Drives have increased to ATA66, ATA100, ATA133, and ABIT even featured a short stint at an overclocked ATA150 showing. As legacy drives have started to fade out, SATA is quickly taking it's place. The default maximum transfer rate of SATA is 150Mb/sec, and SATAII is now rated at a maximum throughput of 300Mb/sec. Things have come a long way.

Today we're taking a look at a couple of drives from Hitachi - the 7K250. The drives that Hitachi sent our way are 120GB SATA drives that feature an 8MB cache and spin at 7,200 rpm. We're going to take a look at these drives in some synthetic tests and also some real world tests as we try them out as single drives, RAID 1 and RAID 0 on our nForce 4 test system. Is RAID really all it's cracked up to be in the real world? How does a single drive from Hitachi perform against a single Western Digital drive? Keep on reading to find out.