I was somewhat wary about buying this hard drive. When I heard the name Deskstar I couldn't help but think of all the "Deathstar" jokes related to their high failure rates. After hearing good things about this drive when looking into 1 TB choices I looked into the Deathstar issue which seems to have been a problem with one particular old model. These days Hitachi are recovering from negative press by producing quality drives.

I bought this drive primarily as a storage drive with my operating system on a 500 GB Western Digital. The hard drive performs well. The good seek time ratings and such translate to reality as it keeps up with my well reviewed WD drive. The fact that it has only a 16MB buffer as opposed to the more standard 32MB doesn't affect it's performance in any noticable way. Writing, reading, defragging and scanning are as fast as hoped. This drive is also very quiet when idle or accessing and will be hard to notice over the CPU and PSU fans (assuming you don't have water cooling). It runs at an average temperature. So far I've been using this drive extensively for 6 months and have had no reliability issues and suprising no bad sectors so it's looking good. Of course, it's always looking good until the day it fails.