The Hitachi TravelStar 5K160 uses PMR (Perpendicular Magnetic Recording)
technology to host a lavish 160 GB of data, making it useful for all kinds of
portable usage including but not limited to notebooks, mobile devices, security
systems using compact hard disks and so on. The drive
has a spindle speed of 5,400 rpm and 8 MB buffer memory. The rated seek time is
11 ms and it has a PATA interface.
The drive gave the best average data transfer rate amongst the drives tested
so far and gave decent scores in other benchmarks.
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We compared its scores against the Hitachi 4K120 and the Seagate Momentus
5400.2 that we had reviewed in November last year. The 4K120 had the same rated
seek time as this 5K160, but a lower spindle speed of 4,200 rpm.
The CPU utilization of this drive is lower at 59.2% (60.3 for those
compared), while the disk access time is 17 ms compared to 19.9 ms for Hitachi
and 16.4 ms for Seagate. The average data transfer rate of the 5K160 is higher
than both the older drives at 36.5 Mbps.
Bottom Line: Higher capacity and good performance make this drive
worth buying for your notebook.