Thread: Hitachi Travelstar 5K500.B

This Hitachi Travelstar 5K500.B mobile hard drive as the name suggests is an upgraded version of its predecessor Travelstar 5K500 which we had reviewed earlier Ganuary'09). Unlike the previous version. this drive complies with the 9.5 mm thick form fac¬tor specification for notebook hard drives. The difference doesn't end here. this drive also brings in the green factor along with some optional security features. Having 500 GB storage capacity with 5400 RPM spindle speed. this drive is aimed to be used in notebooks. but can also be used in external storage and gaming consoles. Having an extended battery life is a sort of a priority with notebooks. the 5K500 helps in extending the battery life as it's quite fru¬gal in power consumption.



The drive features a read/write power specification of just 1.4 W. which is lower than any other 500 GB notebook hard drive. Consuming lesser power and having an eco-friendly halogen-free design. this drive is distinguished with the Hitachi's 'EcoTrac' classification. Travelstar 5K500.B also features an optional Bulk Data Encryption (BDE) for the hard drive level data security.

We tested the drive on an Intel Core 2 Duo based machine with 1GB RAM. We ran HD Tune benchmark to evaluate performance. it gave an average transfer rate of 64.4 MB/sec with an access time of 18.1 ms. These scoces are much higher when comparing with its predecessor. Travelstar 5K500. which had scored 54.2 MB/sec and had an access time of 18.4 ms. The drive also fared better in Business Disk and High-End Disk WinStone 99 benchmarks with scores of 10.1 MB/sec and 37.9 MBI sec respectively.