If you find yourself in need of a replacement hard drive for your computer or if you happen to be putting together a new computer yourself, look no further than the Hitachi Deskstar hard drive. The specific model of drive I bought was the HDS728080PLAT20 and it is an 80 GB ATA drive.

The retail package comes with everything you need to install and setup this hard drive in your computer. This includes an installation guide and configuration CD, mounting screws and interface cable.

Installation

Installation was easy after I opened the case and gained access to where the hard drives are mounted. Since this was going to be a replacement drive for my existing drive I mounted the Hitachi Deskstar drive in the slot just above my existing drive. I didn't need the cable that was included with the drive for my installation, but one is included if you need it. I set this drive as a slave to my master drive and once I had it all hooked up and the jump set correctly (Hitachi put a label on the drive to indicate many of the popular jumper configurations) it was ready to power the computer on.

The rest of the installation involved procedure for formatting and copying the data from my existing drive to new drive. After installing the drive into my computer I loaded the Configuration CD into the CD rom drive and powered on my system. The system booted from the CD and it loaded the Ontrack Disk Manager utility that Hitachi included to make the installation process smooth.

It will step you through the process of preparing the drive for use. It will ask you which OS you plan to load on the drive and it will do quick format on the drive. At this point you can load your OS CD in the drive and reboot your computer and you will be ready to go. For my installation I was going to be using another utility that is included on this CD and it allows me to copy a partition from an existing drive in my system to this new Hitachi drive. With this utility I am upgrading to a larger drive and copying the entire contents of the smaller drive and transferring it to the new larger drive.

Once I had the data transferred to the new drive I powered down the PC and removed the old drive and rebooted the computer. I checked through drive to make sure that everything was transferred and it looked like everything was fine.

Vital Statistics

3.5" hard drive7200 RPM

8.8ms seek time

2 MB Buffer

Parallel ATA

Quiet operation

My thoughts

I have been using this hard drive for a couple of months now and I haven't had any problems at all. I like the quiet operation of it as compared to other brands of hard drives I have used in the past. One of my other computers have a Western Digital 80GB hard drive and it is considerably noisier.

I was really happy with the configuration CD that Hitachi included with this hard drive. It includes utilities that helped me prepare the drive initially for use and once I had the drive ready for use I was ready to install the operating system on the drive. Another thing the CD includes is a utility that allows you to copy an image of the source drive and copy it over to the new drive, this is very useful if you are looking to simply upgrade to a new larger drive. This utility steps you through the process of using the copy feature.

I would definitely purchase this drive again next time I am in the need for a new drive.