CONCLUSION

   Based on our results it's quite clear that SATA II and SATA III are not at all apart in terms of performance (at least not with hard disk drives) which actually makes sense since the maximum speed of SATA II can reach 300MB/s (3Gb/s). Still we can only offer the exact performance differences after testing the Ultrastar 7K4000 4TB SATA III variant which should be quite soon. Certainly compared to one of the 1st SATA III HDDs to hit the market such as the Barracuda XT 2TB the Ultrastar 7K4000 4TB SATA II is quite faster due to the more up to date high quality components used. Overall the Ultrastar 7K4000 4TB SATA II may not be the fastest all around HDD we have ever tested (perhaps the SATA III variant will up the score a bit thus making it the fastest one to date) but it comes real close and for a 4TB drive that's quite impressive.

   Massive capacity hard disk drives don't come cheap especially at the beginning of their availability and that goes double when we are talking about an enterprise class product such as the Ultrastar 7K4000 4TB models which currently retail for around USD520 inside the USA and 470Euros inside the EU. True the price may look somewhat high (and it is for most people) but if you break it down you are only paying around 14 cents per gigabyte which is actually quite remarkable especially if you take into consideration that you need to pay over 10 times as much per gigabyte for an SSD. Bottom line the Ultrastar 7K4000 4TB SATA II drive (and its SATA III variant) is targeted towards people who not only need the massive 4TB capacity but also require the durability and speeds offered by an enterprise class product and because of that we are awarding it with our Platinum Award.

PROS

- Enterprise Class Quality
- 2.0 Million Hours MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures)
- Performance
- 4TB's Capacity
- Temperatures/Noise Levels
- 5 Years Warranty

CONS

- Price Tag (For Some)