Hitachi Travelstar 5K500.B
The .B suffix should be familiar to you by now. This is Hitachi’s way of naming a second-generation hard drive product. The Travelstar 5K500 was a three-platter, 12.5-mm drive, while the new Travelstar 5K500.B is based on two platters, as discussed previously. It has 8 MB of cache memory and runs at the standard spindle speed of 5,400 RPM. We measured a 18.3 ms access time and almost 85 MB/s of maximum sequential read throughput, which is the best peak result of all 5,400 RPM 2.5” drives. However, Seagate and WD happen to deliver slightly higher average and minimum results at reads and writes. The new Hitachi drive delivers only average I/O performance.
The Travelstar 5K500.B requires the least power for playing HD video off the drive (0.9 W), it was efficient at maximum streaming performance (2.4 W), and the idle power of 0.8 W is still a nice result. Hitachi labels its new drives with its EcoTrac logo, which is supposed to represent energy efficiency. Application performance in PCMark Vantage was average.
Hitachi offers 500, 400, 320, 250, 160, and 120 GB capacity models for the regular version and the Bulk Disk Encryption (BDE) drives. There are also 24/7 operation rated Enhanced Availability (EA) drives available at 500, 320, 250, and 160 GB.
Latest Internal Storage News
- 09/02 – Laser Heat Used to Make HDD Write Transfers Faster
- 07/02 – Intel Introduces New 520 Series Line of SSDs
- 02/02 – Seagate Believes HDD Supply Disruption to Continue in 2012
- 01/02 – Other World Computing (OWC) Reveals Two New SSDs
- 28/01 – Cleversafe Announces 10 Exabyte Storage System Configuration
Latest Internal Storage reviews
- 09/02 – Momentus XT 750 GB Review: A Second-Gen Hybrid Hard Drive
- 06/02 – Intel SSD 520 Review: Taking Back The High-End With SandForce
- 01/02 – Upgrade Advice: Does Your Fast SSD Really Need SATA 6Gb/s?
- 26/01 – Install A Hard Drive Or SSD In Your Notebook's Optical Bay
- 24/01 – Best SSDs For The Money: January 2012
Give me a 2.5" Raptor and to hell with the battery!
2.5" Raptor drives are 15mm in depth and therefore are not suitable for notebooks which require 9.5mm or 12.5mm depth drives.
plus the raptors require active cooling and would soon suffer heat related faliure in the cramped confines of a laptop
plus the connections wont be the same as a normal 2,5" hdd.
You guys are telling me we can cram Core i7, 3 x mechanical hard disks, beefy GPU, yet we can't accomodate a Veloci Raptor?
I'm betting it could be done. Simple potential-divider network to get the +12v etc. But even underneath my M570RU, it seems like there is loads of space for something bigger, I can only imagine bigger notebooks might have even more, and if not, with a small case modification, who knows what might be possible?
I even considered taking on this project myself, but then, I just purchased an Intel X25-M 160GB, and as you know - that dropped straight in...
And the connections would be the same, 'cept for the missing 12v.