Hitachi Travel Star 7K100 Hard Disk

This 2.5 inches 7K100 Hitachi TravelStar drive is meant for

the notebook users, compact storage devices and various multimedia devices. It

has a spindle speed of 7,200 rpm and a capacity of 100 GB, which combines the

power of a desktop PC drive and good storage capacity. It supports ATA-6 and

SATA-I for the interface. The SATA support device will provide better

performance compared to the usual PATA platform. It has a data buffer memory of

8 MB. Talking of its high spin rate of 7,200 rpm-which was a distant reality a

few months ago-the power consumption is also higher by about a Watt compared

to a 5,400 rpm drive. This means that your battery will drain out quickly

compared to when working with the lower rpm drives. So you have to decide for

the trade off between the battery life and the performance.

Price: Rs 10,500 (5 yrs warranty)

Key Specs: 2.5” hard drive, 7,200 rpm, 100 GB

Contact: Cyberstar Infocom, Bangalore . Tel: 51266808. Email id: hitachi@cyberstarindia.com

RQS# E61 or SMS 130461 to 9811800601

We tested the drive on ThinkCenter R51 which is a 1.73 GHz

processor with 768 MB RAM. The benchmark results were the best we have seen so

far in 2.5” hard disk segment. The drive results were compared to the Seagate

Momentus 5,400 rpm drive with 120 GB capacity that we reviewed in November 2005.

We tested this one on the same test bed as we did for the Seagate Momentus. In

the Business Disk Winmark, it scored 7.3 Mbps against the 6.85 Mbps scored by

the Seagate. The High-end Disk Winmark and the average data transfer rate are

23.8 and 41.5 respectively, which is 6% and 23% higher, respectively than the

Seagate results. The much higher data transfer rate that it provides, gives you

a much better performance with any application. The disk access time was also

lower at 14.7 ms compared to the 16.4 of the Seagate Momentus which is 11%

lower.

Bottom Line: A good buy for the people willing to

get a better performance and high capacity and feel the need to upgrade from a

4,200 or 5,400 rpm drive to a 7,200 rpm drive for their mobile devices.

Anubhav Verma