For 2.5inch notebook hard drives, it is difficult to enhance overall performance and capacity without any trade-offs. If the capacity was to be increased, the thickness and speed of the drive have to be compromised to ensure that the drive runs stably, vice versa for other conditions. Recently, Hitachi released a new notebook hard drive – Travelstar 7K1000 which finally meets the demands of a good performing drive, high capacity and standard height.
The model number of these drives were stated as “HTS721010A9E630”. These drives are compatible with most notebook computers as it is at 9.5mm thick and at a standard 2.5″ drive dimensions. This 1TB drive weighs 115g. Unlike many 2.5″ 1TB drives, this actually runs at 7200RPM with a internal 32MB cache which can reach internal data transfer speeds of 160.5MB/s, average latency of 4.2ms and a 12ms average seek time. This is most definitely the best notebook hard drive in the market right now.
As for power consumption, the drive utilized 0.1W at sleep, 0.2W on stand by, 0.8W when on low power idle, 1.0W on active idle, 1.7W on high performance idle, 1.8W when reading and writing, 2.1W on seek and peaks at 5.5W. At idle, its noise is at 2.5Bels while 2.7Bels when seeking.
Hitachi did not disclose any details of the drive, but we infer that it is using a single 1TB platter with a storage density of 676GB per square inch.
The hard drive is now being sold in Japan Akihabara for 7980-8980yen, which is about 106SGD-120SGD.
Before Hitachi released the 7K1000, Samsung Toshiba, Western Digital have all released a standard 9.5mm thickness 1TB 2.5″ drive, but the speed is only at 5400RPM. Hitachi’s 7200RPM drive is around 10SGD more expensive than the 5400RPM variants, making it actually an affordable alternative for those who seek performance on a hard drive.
