This Hitachi Travelstar 5K500.B mobile hard drive as the name suggests is an
upgraded version of its predecessor Travelstar 5K500 which we had reviewed
earlier (January'09). Unlike the previous version, this drive complies with the
9.5 mm thick form factor specification for notebook hard drives. The difference
doesn't end here, this drive also brings in the green factor along with some
optional security features. Having 500 GB storage capacity with 5400 RPM spindle
speed, this drive is aimed to be used in notebooks, but can also be used in
external storage and gaming consoles. Having an extended battery life is a sort
of a priority with notebooks, the 5K500 helps in extending the battery life as
it's quite frugal in power consumption.
Price: Rs 14,590 Key Specs: DES, Solid Capacitor Design, DualBIOS Contact: Gigabyte, Mumbai Tel: 40633222 Email: viveks@gigabyte.in Website: www.gigabyte.in SMS Buy 130579 to 56677 |
The drive features a read/write power specification of just 1.4 W, which is
lower than any other 500 GB notebook hard drive. Consuming lesser power and
having an eco-friendly halogen-free design, this drive is distinguished with the
Hitachi's 'EcoTrac' classification. Travelstar 5K500.B also features an optional
Bulk Data Encryption (BDE) for the hard drive level data security.
We tested the drive on an Intel Core 2 Duo based machine with 1GB RAM. We ran
HD Tune benchmark to evaluate performance, it gave an average transfer rate of
64.4 MB/sec with an access time of 18.1 ms. These scores are much higher when
comparing with its predecessor, Travelstar 5K500, which had scored 54.2 MB/sec
and had an access time of 18.4 ms. The drive also fared better in Business Disk
and High-End Disk WinStone 99 benchmarks with scores of 10.1 MB/sec and 37.9
MB/sec respectively.
Bottomline: It consumes lesser power while delivering good
performance—ideal for notebooks.