HERE SIZE DOESN'T MATTER anymore. As you see Hitachi has squeezed a 500GB of space into this 2.5" HDD. This is the first highest-capacity mobile hard drive I have tested so far. The Travelstar 5K500 is the fourth-generation Hitachi mobile drive to use perpendicular magnetic recording technology to deliver breakthrough capacity and reliability. The drive is available with a 3.0Gbps Serial ATA (SATA) interface.

In spite of being small, it delivered a go'od speed in our test. The read speed for a 700MB data (Indian PC Magazine test file) was 11 second which is pretty fast compared to any of the drives we have tested. It even beats the WD Passport Elite of the same RPM. It also took the same amount of time to write the same amount of data as well.

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To test the reading and writing speed, we used a compilation of 4.7GB of data and measure the real-time it took to transfer these data. It took lmin 59 sec to read and 2min 7 sec to write the data which is faster compare d to the WD Elite. The green thing is in and Hitachi is being seen as the one jumping into the green wagon. The Travelstar 5K500 is using a three disk design for its high capacity but consume the same amount of power as the predecessor with two disk. The Travelstar 5K500 features a 1.9 watt read/write power draw, and its 0.7 watt low power idle means longer battery life for notebooks.

The Travelstar 5K500 offers Rotational Vibration Safeguard (RVS) technology, which acts as an "early warning" system for the drive, enabling it to sense a possible disturbance (such as vibrations within the system enclosure) in advance and take the necessary steps to stabilize the drive head and avoid any disruptions. The overall performance and features of the 5K500 definitely a choice for laptops, "slim" desktops, full-featured notebooks, and gaming consoles.