CONCLUSION

   From the results of all our tests it's quite clear that SATA III performs more or less the same (wins in some benchmarks, falls back in others) as SATA II with standard mechanical hard disk drives something which doesn't really come as a surprise if we take into account that the theoretical maximum bandwidth of SATA II can reach 300MB/s (3Gb/s). Certainly that is not enough for modern SSDs and their lightning fast read/write speeds which come really close to the maximum bandwidth of 600MB/s (6Gb/s) SATA III offers but for regular HDDs it should be sufficient for a long time to come. On the other hand you can't really expect manufacturers to stick only with SATA II just because it's sufficient (HGST clearly manufactures both SATA II/III compatible versions of the same models) for HDDs, besides there's virtually no difference in cost so having the latest connectivity available (backwards compatible of course) is never a bad thing.

   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 USD510 inside the USA and 460Euros 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 account that you pay over 10 times as much per gigabyte for an SSD. Bottom line the Ultrastar 7K4000 4TB drives (SATA II/III versions) 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)