HGST/Hitachi (HUA723020ALA641) Ultrastar 7K3000 2TB 64MB 7200RPM 3.5 (Enterprise Grade) SATA III 6.0Gb/s Hard Drive

I bought this hard disk for the Plugable USB 3.0 SuperSpeed SATA III Vertical Hard Drive Docking Station. It got the best reviews for life time reliability compared to Seagate and Western Digital and Samsung. This was done by an independent agency that runs long term continuous tests over many years on all makes of hard drives and the Hitachi Ultrastar came out on top. It has been working flawlessly for 6 months now and works great as a 2TB external backup drive for my computer.

This hard drive was easy to fit in my system. I have tried many named hard drives and they do not seem to last a long as the Hitachi.

Works great for recording TV on my Media Center PC. My old green drive would pause and drop frames all the time.

Flawless !.

Bought this in 2014, and its still running like a charm. High performance with no issues. Highly recommended.

It works well.

Pros: Is a hard drive. Seems reliable. Does hold 2tb. Fast enough for an HDD anyways. Cons: Hitachi drives are a bit loud and this is no exception.

After receiving a defective drive the seller bent over backwards to make it right with me and the replacement worked perfectly and synced up easily.

Good stable drive for the money.

The reason for my 3 stars on longevity is because Ive only recently installed this drive in the last few weeks, so I havent been able to judge its longevity. But, can I say WOW!? We have a backup archive located on an older XP machine with fairly recent motherboard, which can handle SATA II. This hard drive is installed in that machine. Im using Acronis 11.7 to push backups from various mission-critical computers to this Hitachi hard drive. Here are my observations. First I had a Western Digital Green drive in the place where this new drive is now installed in the hard drive cage. That green drive always was a bit slow on backups, anywhere between an hour to 3 hours for a single image to be copied. So I had to spread out my backup schedule so as to not overload the XP computers max of 10 connections (user sessions). One Acronis backup takes three user sessions in XP, so you can only run three backups at a time (and even that is risky). As you can imagine, to backup the images for 10 mission-critical computers would take days, not just hours. As the green drive aged over the past few years, the backup times got slower and slower, almost as if it was getting too full, even though I managed the space enough to have at least 30% drive space available, even with all backups on board. The aging of the drive sent the backup times into orbit, with 6 to 10 hours needed for just one backup. After about four years from new install until now, the green drives eventually died. I started doing research on what guys were recommending for a good, reliable drive these days, and other than Samsung (with expensive price tag to boot), I saw Hitachi is making some noise with certain lines of their drives in the realm of longevity, efficiency and reliability. Enter this Hitachi drive into my backup schema. WOW, WOW, WOW, images are now only taking a MAX of 34 minutes to perform! Some backups of the C drive image are now transferred in less than 20 minutes! This is across a gigabit network on a SATA II serial drive controller running XP! Im impressed! So the green drive wasnt a good choice at all, even from the beginning. I knew they suffered on performance a little bit, but I never realized by how much. Were trying to stay economical here, so please dont rag me about XP or using cheap drives, etc. I cant complain too badly, the XP machine has been a breeze to manage, with no security issues at all and the green drive did last about 6 years with 24/7 operation. This little backup rack mounted computer has been reliable as sin. But, the Hitachi blows the old performance away, even with the same motherboard, NIC and SATA controller. I can only imagine what the time saved would be if the PC had a SATA III controller. In any case, I can now run much faster and more frequent backups instead on settling for one-a-week like I did with the old drive. If this drive lasts for 5 to 10 years, itll be worth every penny. I installed the green drive back in 2015, I hope to get slightly longer time out of the Hitachi. MTBF is really no good indicator of real-life longevity for any hard drive, but I think I can rely on the word of lots of professionals who have had good luck recently with Hitachi. So here I am giving it my first whirl in a long time. I do have some old Hitachi EIDE drives, which I believe to this day would probably spin up and perform just fine. Though drives are not made that way anymore, I think Hitachi has proven they know what they are doing when it comes to hard drive manufacturing. (update) 6 months later in January 2020, the drive is still going strong and fast. Backups have not failed once in the last six months, which is a record for this PC. This drive continues to perform very well in our Windows XP backup computer. This computer is dedicated to just doing nothing but making copies of backups to the onboard drives. The computer is a rack mount unit and contains two of these Hitachi drives. We use Acronis to perform the backups. I cant begin to tell you how awful slow it was to back up with Acronis on the old WD Green drives. Id have to space the backups at least 12 hours apart, and even then, the backups werent reliable. With the Hitachi drives installed, the backups only take about 20 to 35 minutes to image the C: drive from the host computer across a gigabit network. Very impressive. And we have not missed ONE SINGLE BACKUP since I installed these drives last summer. Which is a historical event for me. Other drives, whether they were WD or Seagate, always had reliability issues. I had always thought it was an Acronis or a Windows issue, but now I know its not true. Its just lousy HDDs. I feel for the people who have bought these drives and have had duds with them, and that can happen with any platter HDD today, please give them another shot. I had a bad one of these Hitachi drives, too, it lasted a couple of weeks and died, but the Amazon vendor promptly replaced it. The drives have been great. Now comes the long haul, but I thought I would at least update you on the last 6 months with these Hitachi drives, I cant praise them enough for a spindle drive. So far, so good!) 28APR20-Update: Something to keep in mind when doing image backups of your C drives in Windows, make sure you have cleaned up your shadow storage in Windows, cleaned out the temp files in the System 32 directory and set your Windows Backup and Recovery options for as small as you dare. This greatly affects how much storage is used by your image. Your image is going to include all the junk space as well as the obvious usage that Windows reports in the explorer window. So be certain you have this all cleaned up and under control, else you could wind up using your HDD space for backups a lot sooner than you think. I discovered this after having abnormally large hard drive usage in Win7, after I cleaned up the shadow storage through a DOS command line, I was able to shorten the Windows backup and recovery space and re-run my Acronis backups with considerable relief of the backup space used (about 50%), so its vitally important to conserve your remote backup space with these methods. Now I can use more of the space on these Hitachi drives for more backups for other computers! The drives are still going strong with fast, reliable backups, not a single backup job with Acronis has failed since I installed them in the summer of 2019.