HDD by stefan @ 2013-08-21
With the new Travelstar 5K1500 2.5’’ drive from HGST we get plenty of storage space and a silent drive which can be used in most notebooks, our gaming PCs for secondary storage purposes or in game consoles if we use to install a lot of content on them.
At first we would like to thank HGST for offering a sample of their latest Travelstar 5K1500 2.5-inch Mobile HDD for testing and reviewing.
"HGST, (formerly Hitachi GST), offers reliable protection when you need it most, whether you want storage that's personal, portable, tough or high performing.
Mission
Deliver the industry’s best customer experience through innovation, product breadth, quality and operational excellence.
Description
HGST (formerly Hitachi GST and now a Western Digital company) provides a wide range of products that includes hard disk drives, enterprise-class solid state drives, and innovative external storage solutions and services that store, preserve and manage the world’s most valued data."
Up to 1.5TB of capacity
Advanced Format, 512 byte emulation
6Gb/s SATA interface
Dual Stage Actuator (DSA)
Low power consumption
Halogen-free for eco-friendly design
Self-encrypting models for data security
Enhanced availability (EA) models for applications needing around-the-clock access in lower-transaction environments
Our sample has arrived as a bare drive, sealed inside an anti-static bag to protect from the outside factors:
On the top side of the drive we can find most of the useful information like power rating, the interface the drive works on, the rotational speed, capacity, HDD name, but also the lengthier code name. Some serial numbers are also present further down along with the Advanced Format logo and the manufacturing date:
The front side comes with some additional bar codes:
The sides have holes for the mounting screws:
On the back we can see the SATA Data/Power connectors along with two pins for upgrade purposes:
Lastly, on the bottom side of the drive we will see the PCB along with the electrical contact which travels to the HDDs’ motor:
CPU : Intel I5 3750K Retail @ 4.7GHz
CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-D14
Motherboard : ASRock Z77 Extreme6
RAM :GeIL PC3-17000 2133MHz 8GB EVO Leggera
Video : Sparkle X560 Calibre
Power Supply : Cooler Master 850W
HDD : Seagate Barracuda 320GB 7200.10
Case: Cooler Master ATCS 840
Out of the box, the drive arrives unformatted:
Here is a snapshot of the total reported free space by Windows 7:
With the help of AIDA64, we can extract more information regarding the drive:
With the new Travelstar 5K1500 from HGST we get a lot of storage space at the expense of lower transfer speeds compared to the 7K1000 variant, which we could happily recommend as a laptop boot drive (in case we do not have a SSD already and favor capacity to speed). The transfer speeds are quite decent and the drive maintains a low noise during operation.
The 5K1500 Travelstar also comes with Dual-Stage Actuator technology; the conventional mobile HDDs use only one actuator, a voice coil motor for positioning the read-write head. To hit the smaller moving targets on the platter, while using a single stage it would be like writing with a rigid wrist and fingers while with the second stage acts like our wrist and fingers, allowing us to position the pen more accurately. This new technology was implemented in order to improve head-positioning accuracy for better performance, data integrity and overall drive reliability.
HGST recommends these drives in notebook PCs or gaming PCs (our recommendation would be to install them as secondary drives), but also consoles, blade servers, network routers or for video surveillance. As a real-life test, we have installed the 5K1500 inside our PS3 to replace a 500GB Caviar Black and we have seen a very small performance drop, while the available storage space has tripled, which is a huge improvement.
The Travelstar 5K1500 from HGST is available online for about 115 Euros.
We would like to thank again to HGST for making this review possible!