Hitachi TravelStar 5K500.B 2.5in internal hard drive

Laptop computers needn’t have any less storage than desktops, and this 500 GB drive from Hitachi proves it. It has a standard 2.5-inch form factor and uses two platters, with a data density of 250 GB per platter. As is usual with most such HDDs, it features a buffer size of 8 MB and spins at 5400 RPM. The fact that it uses a standard SATA II interface, is small and does not generate heat also makes it a candidate for enthusiasts to use in a desktop. Hitachi claims the power usage is reduced to 0.5W during idle and 1.4W during read/write, as against other laptop HDDs that consume 0.85W and 2.85W respectively.

Synthetic benchmarks and real world tests were run using our testbench to eliminate bottlenecks. We measured a read speed average of 65.5 megabytes per second, and write speed average of 58 MBps, and never went below a minimum of 35 MBps. These numbers put this HDD about 6 MBps faster than the average. Real world file read/write speeds stood at 77.3 MBps for a single large file (6.42 GB), but fell to 66.4 MBps as expected when copying multiple smaller files (800 files totalling up to 6.36 GB). Transferring files from one partition to another on the same drive was at an average of 24 MBps. This means the drive’s real world read/write speeds are 10 MBps higher than the average, but moving files between partitions is slow by the same extent. Both read and write access times averaged at 18.4 ms which is slightly slower than the average of 17ms for most other such drives. Under normal operating conditions, the drive is inaudible unless you press your ear to it.

The Hitachi 5K500.B does consume less power, but other laptop HDD manufacturers have managed to achieve quite the same speeds today. So unless you need the power savings or BDE (bulk drive encryption — useful for organisations), this drive doesn’t distinguish itself from the others.