[Brian]

The Hitachi Travelstar 7K500 is their fifth-generation 2.5" 7200RPM hard drive. Available in capacities ranging from 120-500GB, our review unit is the top-of-the-line 500GB version (HTS725050A9A364). The Travelstar 7K500 is widely regarded as the fastest notebook hard drive on the market; but our tests had something else to say.

Hitachi Travelstar 7K500 Review

[Phil]

Thanks for the interesting review Charles.

Too bad it only includes one real world test (HTPC) and not the most representative for normal usage.

Seagate 7200.4 does very well in synthetic benchmarks, but when it comes to real world performance it's a different story. The reviews of Techreport.com showed the WD5000bevt and WD3200bekt to have the upper hand over the 7200.4.

I still believe the 7K500 will outperform the 7200.4 and WD3200bekt in most single user, normal notebook usage scenarios, like my review showed. It doesn't have the fastest I/O though, probably caused by the not so good acces times.

Tom's Hardware has also published a lot of benchmarks on all these drives. Unfortunately all synthetic, but PC Mark Vantage can give a nice indication. Hitachi 7K500 comes out top (link).

[Brian]

Phil - we've created another real world benchmark, details coming soon, but it's a 3-hour use scenario for a productivity user. Tons of random access...stay tuned.