Hitachi P7K500

[Cablespider]

I just treated myself to a new rig. Parts in sig. After building over the weekend, I ran into a snag.

I was going to get some Seagate's but was left feeling uneasy about the 500GB 7200.11's. I had to make another choice. Here's where I made a mistake: I had T7K500 in mind after reading some reviews but when I purchased, I picked a pair of the P7K500's. My deeerrrrr moment.

So now I need to know how gimped I am. Am I making much ado about nothing? Gaming is it's main use. I don't care about top notch performance but I don't want to be seriously crippled either. How concerned should I be about that access time?

Now, keep in mind, the rig runs very well. I have had no problems and everything is lickity split. Until now, I've never been concerned about drives. I only build once a year (sometimes 2) and drop in the latest Seagate model at the time. A friend asked me to benchmark the drives and when we compared, I was shocked. Now I can't get this image out of my head thinking I seriously goofed up on the purchase for a performance desktop.

I ran Hitachi's Feature tool against the drives to see if AAM was hindering access time. To my surprise, acoustic management was turned off.