Hitachi Travelstar 5K320

Travelstar is a high capacity compact HDD with a form factor of 2.5 in. and

comes with storage capacity ranging from 80 GB to 320 GB. Spindle speed of this

HDD is 5400 rpm with SATA 3 GB/s interface. It comes with Enhanced Availability

for apps needing round-the-clock access and consumes less power. One optional

interesting feature of this HDD is Bulk Data Encryption with SATA 1.5 GB/s

interface for hard-drive level data security. In this technique data is

encrypted using a key when it is written to the disk. For enhancing reliability

Travelstar comes with altitude sensing Thermal Fly-High control and True Track

technology. It is ideal for notebooks and small form factor storage devices.

We carried out different tests to check the performance of this HDD with an

Intel quad core machine with 2 GB RAM. On Business Disk Winmark, the disk gave a

throughput of 9 MB/s that is about 3 MB/s more than WD Scorpio Notebook HDD

(reviewed PCQ June '06). In high-end Disk Winmark it gave a throughput of 36

MB/s that was about 4 MB/s more than WD Scorpio. It took 18 ms to access data,

which is almost equal to that attained by WD Scorpio.

Bottomline: 320 GB storage space in 2.5” casing is ideal for portable

devices, on top of it price of under 5k makes it a must buy.