Thread: Hitachi 500GB hard drive

Laptop computers needn't have any less storage than desktops, and this 500 GB drive from Hitachi proves it. It has a standard 2.5-inch form factor and uses two platters, with a data density of 250 GB per platter. As with most such HDDs, it features a buffer size of 8 MB and spins at 5400 RPM. The fact that it uses a standard SATA II interface, is small, quiet and does not generate much heat also makes it a candidate for enthusiasts to use in a desktop. Hitachi claims the power usage is reduced to 0.5W during idle and l.4W during read/write, as against other laptop HODs that consume 0.85W and 2.85W respectively.

Synthetic benchmarks and real world tests were run using our testbench to eliminate bottlenecks. We measured a read speed average of 65.5 MBps, and write speed average of 58 MBps, both of which never went below a minimum of 35 MBps. These numbers put this HOD about 6 MBps faster than the average. Real world file read/write speeds stood at 77.3 MBps for a single large file (6.42 GB), but fell to 66.4 MBps as expected when copying multiple smaller files (800 files totaling up to 6.36 GB).



Transfering files from one partition to another on the same drive was at an average of 24 MBps. This means the drive's real world read/write speeds are 10 MBps higher than the average, but moving files between partitions is slow by the same extent. Both read and write access times averaged at 18.4 ms which is slightly slower than the average of 17 ms for most other such drives.

The Hitachi 5K500.B does consume less power, but other laptop HDD manufacturers have managed to achieve quite the same speeds today. So unless you need the power savings or encryption capabilities, this drive doesn't distinguish itself from the others.