THE HITACHI TRAVEL STAR 5K320 is a 2.5-inch laptop drive. This 320GB capacity, dual-platter ., model spins at 5400 RPM, supports SATA interface, and has a buffer size of 8MB. Seeing how this is primarily a laptop drive, power consumption and heat dissipation becomes important and we focused our attention on these factors.

We found the Travelstar 5K320's performance better in terms of overall data throughput and application performance. In our benchmark testing it provided good results, and is definitely quick: We encountered an average random read speed of 46.5 MB/s and write speed of 47.6 MB/s with an overall CPU utilization of 8 percent, which is noteworthy. These read/write speeds are almost comparable with hanaard desktop drives.

This hard drive's access time was as little as 17 milliseconds. For our realworld file-handling test we moved a single large file (6042GB ISO), and a folder comprising of several files (2.01GB), to and fro and were impressed with the figures we saw. We got speeds of 40MB/s and 17MB/s, respectively.



The Travelstar 5K320 wasn't unnecessarily noisy throughout our testing. Not only limited to laptops, its small form factor also makes it usable for external storage - just put it in an adequate case and you're good to go. There are optional features,
such as Bulk Data Encryption (BDE) for added security but with a slower SATA 1.5Gb/s interface, that are available in the Travelstar 5K320 series of drives. If you're looking to upgrade your laptop hard drive, this Hitachi drive is definitely worth checking out, and we think it makes sense to buy this laptop drive at the given price point.