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We’re now in the realm of SATAIII and 6 Gb⁄s drives. SATAIII drives are backward compatible with the older SATAII bus and should work well in most older systems. SATAIII is the specification rules by which that family of drives has to operate. In reality it doesn’t mean much in the way of performance since the speed that a drive is capable of is essentially limited by three physical features. Platter density, rotational speed and the number of platters all have a huge bearing on a drives performance. Some drives may have feature sets that also effect performance.
The new Hitachi 0F12450 3TB drive is the first large capacity SATAIII drive that we tested. We’ve had good luck with this drive and highly recommend it for use in approved applications. The one hiccup with this drive is it’s larger than 2TB size. Many 32-bit operating systems have a 2048 MB (2-TB) limit for any drive that’s attached. In addition, many peripherals such as firewire enclosures are not capable of drives over 2TB. If you’re interested in large capacity drives please click on the link for the 0F12450 drive and read about it.
 Hitachi advertises the 0F12450 drive performance to be about 165 MB⁄s, with our actual confirmed speeds right at 155 MB⁄s, read and writes very close to each other.
Beware the OEM drive! The hard drive market is flooded with OEM drives being sold at huge discounts. These drives usually have unknown or proprietary firmware and quite often offer no manufacturers warranty. These drives tend to cause a lot of compatibility problems and often decreased performance. We recommend that you stick with RETAIL version drives for the best performance and reliability.
Don’t forget to order your spare Burly Drive Trays to go with your new drives.
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