INTRODUCTION

   We all know (or at least most of us) that hard disk drives are much slower than solid state drives and so using the second just to house the primary OS (operating system) is always the ideal scenario. However no one can deny the splendid price/capacity ratio of HDDs especially now that we even have massive 4TB units available. Personally i don't feel I’ll ever be happy at least not until we finally see drives with capacities well exceeding the 10TB mark but in the meantime they highest available capacities will just have to do. A couple of months ago we checked the latest consumer oriented Deskstar 7K4000 4TB SATA III hard disk drive by Hitachi GST and as promised back then today on our test bench we have the latest enterprise class Ultrastar 7K4000 4TB SATA II hard disk drive.

   HGST, a Western Digital company, is a market leader in enterprise hard disk drives and develops advanced hard disk drives, enterprise-class solid state drives, and external storage solutions and services that are used by large and sophisticated technology companies to store, preserve and manage data. HGST storage solutions have a reputation for quality, reliability and innovation. Our drives are trusted by the world’s high-transactional enterprises, Internet services companies, creative professionals, and consumer electronics and automotive system manufacturers to store the avalanche of new content resulting from cloud computing and services, virtualization, social networks, HD video and mobile platforms. HGST focuses on delivering innovative, customized storage solutions that are an integral part of a customer’s broader systems, infrastructure and application platforms ensuring a storage value proposition that addresses each customer use case and pain point. This consultative approach to storage coupled with technical expertise, a comprehensive customer support infrastructure, world-class operations and a broad portfolio of solutions sets a high standard for product and service excellence. Founded by the pioneers of hard drives in 2003, HGST became a separate and wholly owned subsidiary of Western Digital Corporation in March, 2012. HGST maintains its U.S. headquarters in San Jose, California and is marketed under the HGST brand name.

   Many of you are certain to think that i made a typo error when writing the title of this review but that's not the case not and so today we will be taking a look at the SATA II variant of the Ultrastar 7K4000 4TB line. Now i can't really say why (perhaps SATA III is not 100% backwards compatible) but Hitachi GST offers the same exact drive in both SATA II and III flavors so we thought this would be the excellent opportunity to test both variants to accurately measure any differences in performance (testing the same exact drive in SATA II and SATA III versions with the same system is as good as it gets) although in the following benchmarks you will see that there's virtually no (or very little) performance difference between the Ultrastar 7K4000 4TB SATA II and our previously reviewed SATA III drives. So time to get up close and personal with the Ultrastar 7K4000 4TB SATA II HDD and see what kind of performance you can expect from it (aside its massive 4TB capacity).