Hitachi 500 GB HDDs

Hard drive manufacturers have always focused on increasing the speed and

capacity of their products, but now they started making hard-drives efficient on

energy consumption. Hitachi too goes “green” with the launch of their 500GB

hard-drives both for desktop and mobile users.

Deskstar P7K500



P7K500 uses the HiVERT technology and also features Advanced Power Management
capabilities that results in better power handling during read-write operations

and also when the drive is idle. This 500GB power efficient drive has a cache

memory of 16MB and features a SATA interface that enables a data transfer rate

from drive's buffer to interface at 3 GB/sec. This drive features a 7200 RPM

spindle speed, which, when compared to Western Digital's RE2 GreenPower series

hard drive, is higher as RE2 had a sub-7200 RPM speed to conserve on power

consumption. The power consumption at idle mode for this drive is 4.8 W, which

is a bit higher when compared to Western Digital's RE2, that consumed 4W at idle

mode. We tested the drive on an Intel Core 2 Duo based machine with 1GB RAM. We

ran the HD Tune benchmark to evaluate performance, it gave an average transfer

rate of 78.4 MB/s and an access time of 18.8 ms. Comparing these scores to

Samsung Spinpoint HD501LJ (reviewed August 2007), which had the same spindle

speed and capacity, P7K500 scored higher. It also scored well with 13.3 and 66.3

Mbps in the Business Disk and High-End Disk Winstone 99 benchmarks respectively.

This drive is ideal for desktops that are used as media-center PC or gaming PCs,

even for small data-centers the drive can be useful.

Travelstar 5K500



Another 500GB hard-drive from Hitachi, but meant for mobile users, which will
rid them of carrying external storage drives as their notebook's HDD has limited

capacity. Thus, a 500GB HDD in their notebook will satiate their need. Being

from the Travelstar lineage, this drive is frugal on power consumption. It draws

1.9W power during read-write operation and 0.7W during idle mode, which results

in longer battery life. The drive features a 8MB cache memory and has 3Gb/s SATA

interface with 5400 RPM spindle speed for enhanced performance. For reliability,

this drive features a 400Gs of shock protection that will safeguard the data

from fall and rough handling. To make this 2.5” drive for notebooks, Hitachi has

made it 3mm thicker to what is the industry-standard of 9mm thickness. This

means, you cannot just replace your present notebook's HDD with this Hitachi's

500GB drive. To counter this, Hitachi unveiled a second version to this drive

which complies the industry-standard for drive's thickness and is aptly named as

TravelStar 5K500.B. Testing the drive on same setup as that of P7K500, we ran HD

Tune to get average transfer rate of 54.2 MB/s and access time of 18.4ms.

Comparing the scores to older Travelstar drives of Hitachi, 5K160 (reviewed on

October '06) the 5K500 clocked a much higher data transfer rate.

Travelstar 5K500

Deskstar P7K500

Bottomline: The P7K500 drive is a good buy for desktop users seeking

higher capacity but having restriction of lesser space, while mobile users

should opt for the second version of 5K500 complying to industry-standards as it

will fit into their notebooks.