The Drive

First off, we have the box that the drive is shipped in. Hitachi has gone for a retail box rather than shipping them in OEM style like the Seagate and Samsung drives usually come as. On the front we have some basic info on the drive including its capacity.

On the back of the box Hitachi has a huge amount of marketing material and some basic info on the drive including its 5400RPM speed and the 8MB of cache memory.

Moving to the drive itself we see the actual drive that Hitachi produces. On the design side there is nothing spectacular about the drive, it's light in weight and looks well constructed. On the top of the drive there is a identification label with info on the drive including model numbers, spindle speed and capacity which is 250GB for this model we were sent.

The bottom of the drive is extremely bare; only a bare PCB. Due to the circuits being placed between the drive case and the top of the PCB there is nothing to short out on the bottom of the drive, a very good idea.

The interface on the back of the drive is a standard Serial ATA setup, meaning it can be used on standard PC's without the need of a converter like older 44-pin IDE drives needed.