Hitachi Ultrastar A7K2000 2TB HDD Review: A Budget-Friendly Storage Solution with Caveats

This is a USED drive as in USED UP. However, $43 for a 2TB was such a bargain I bought it on a whim. Like one might buy a pack of gum. Well, when I got it I decided to back-up a Windows 10 machine boot drive running a with a Hybrid Hard disk. This may have been divine intervention. Exactly 4 days later I lost power for about 3 seconds as the desktop was doing some kind of upgrade (video? security? both?). After that the Windows 10 OS informed me that it was running some fixes (it was a blue-screen but not the blue screen of death but it might as well have been). Well the fixes/repair never worked and the desktop failed to boot up after that. I took out this cheap (probably mostly worn out drive) booted up the machine from it, cloned this $43 drive back to the Hybrid and about 9 hours later ALL was well. I put the drive back on the shelf where it will sit until the next time I decide to back-up the boot drive or use it to restore to the boot drive. It's cheap insurance, well worth it. This $43 drive is perfect for a one off restore and/or backup. I would NOT use it for everyday chores or use -- Unless configured as a bunch of them (5 or more?) as a RAID 5 -- Or 2 of them in a RAID 1. BTW, try not to be alarmed by the noisy racket this drive makes. It's probably just it way of saying, "You better make sure you have everything backed up at least once because you never know when this "coffee grinder" [a quiet coffee grinder] is going to fail". Or any hard drive for that matter.

Works fine. 7200 rpm drives are not fast these days as a boot drive or even to run games off of, but are great for holding enormous amounts of data and recalling it when needed. I was and am leery about using a refurbed drive, but two things caused me to get this anyway. The price is very good, and Backblaze has listed Hitachi drives as being the lowest failure rate for a little while now. (This used to be the opposite of true, I had 2 Hitachi Deskstars die on me in very short time, and when I researched them to see if this was common, I learned that so many of them died that they were being called the Hitachi Deathstar.) I bought two of these and immediately put 600 gigs of data on them, and neither had any trouble. You'll have to get disk management in Windows to see them and format them. I have run chkdsk on each right off the bat, both reported zero errors. As of now, I'm rating them 5 stars, if either one dies, it's 1 star, a new review, and no more touching Hitachi.

Excellent value HDD, packaged very well and works as it should. I have to acknowledge the fact that this is the loudest HDD I have heard in over 15 years...most likely due to it being Enterprise but I'd you can remember the older PC's that had the constant clunking of the read head moving back and forth then this will make you remember just how loud they were at one time...other than that though, its working fine at this point

Stay away, far away from these 2TB Sata Hdd's They say get what you pay for...boy is that saying ever true. anyone that pays for an off brand sata HDD ( Hatachi isn't known for HDD's ) is looking for trouble. There are just some products that you have to pay top dollar for and a well build, named brand HDD is one of those products. It took me way too long to receive the two, 2TB Sata hdd's and when they finally came, i didn't attempt to install them for about a week. Opened one sata HDD and installed it. turned on the power to my PC...smoke started coming from the hdd and a burning smell. I immediately turned off the PC in a panic! I didn't bother trying to see if the 2nd 2TB hdd would go up in moke. I returned both, the unopened one and the chard one. Don't trust these hatachi hdd's at all. Go WD or Seagate

I bought 2 of these drives to be used in an old NetGear ReadyNAS Duo (v1) as one of the original (mirrored) drives had died and the reallocated sector count on the second one started increasing, so complete failure was in my foreseeable future. I was a little concerned about wisdom of buying refurbished drives, but I decided that I didn't want to spend much on a NAS device already 5 years old. When they arrived, I noticed that the boxes were labelled '(Certified Refurbished)' and 'New'. I unpacked them, let them come up to room temperature and then hooked them up for some tests. All the SMART data were zeroed and the tests showed that they were in good working order. They were not making any unusual sounds. I have placed the first one into the ReadyNAS and the mirror set has been rebuilt. I am now ready for the second of my original disks to fail. When that happens I will place the second new drive into the NAS. Definitely happy with the price and the product.

I bought 2 of these to use in my desktop in raid 1. No issues so far but I have not had them long the S.M.A.R.T. status says the drives are good but the test of time will tell. Biggest gripe with these drive....THE ARE LOUD AS HELL! I have had many HDD's over the years but nothing had come close to being as loud as these are. As I write this they are syncing the raid 1 setup and it sounds like someone is jackhammering in here!! I would not recommend this as a main hard drive, only as a storage drive due to the noise.

It works. Can't ask for more. No big thrill except it's an extra 2 Terabytes of storage. Dropped it in and immediate lots of extra storage. Allows me to have backups to my backups of precious files stored in an older backup computer. Came well and properly sealed and packed. Dropped in, plugged in, ran. I formatted it, ran disk checks and all is good. Mine runs silently. A lot less noise than my main PC. Please note that it does NOT come with cables ( most don't), so if you are adding a second (3rd, or 4th) drive you'll need to plan accordingly. Same if you want to transfer data from your old drive to this one. I had to twiddle my thumbs for a couple of days because I didn't have a SATA data cable laying around.