Hitachi Ultrastar 7K4000 4TB The Hitachi Ultrastar 7K4000 4TB made its first appearance on Maximum PC back in September 2012, when a gaggle of them debuted in the Dream Machine. At the time, they were the only 7,200rpm 4TB drives available, so they fit right in among all the other expensive and hard-to-find components. Now that the dust has settled and the 7K4000 has some company, we decided to put it on the test bench to see how it fares against its only rival in the 4TB category. Hitachi’s Ultrastar 7K4000 was the first 4TB drive to roll with 7,200rpm spindle speeds, but these days it has company. Examining the spec sheet, we see the Hitachi is a spitting image of its WD nemesis, the Western Digital RE4 TB, and since WD owns the Hitachi storage division now, you would be forgiven for thinking the Hitachi drive is a rebadged WD model. As far as we can tell, however, the drives are physically different. Despite this, both share the same overall design, with five 800GB platters spinning at 7,200rpm, and both have a 64MB buffer as well as a SATA 6Gb/s interface. One area in which the Hitachi has a major advantage is MTBFâ€"it’s rated at 2 million hours, which is almost double the 1.2 million hours offered by the WD drive and among the highest MTBF drives available today. Moving along to benchmark results, we found very few surprises here, at least in comparison to the equally equipped WD 4TB drive. Both drives performed almost exactly the same in our sequential-read
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