Hitachi Travelstars

Notebook hard drives are the 2.S-inch versions of 3.S-inch drives. We received two 2.S-inch notebook hard drives from Hitachi - the Travelstar iK500 HTSS4S0S0KTA300 and the Travelstar SK500. BHTS5450S0B9A300. Both have a capacity of 500 GB and an 8 MB cache. The 5K500 measures 12.5 mm whereas the 5K5OO. B has a height of 9.5 mm. Both these drives have SATA Interfaces with the only difference here being that the iK500 does not have a cover over the SATA connectors while the SKSOO.B does have it. The SKSOO drive is based on a three-platter design, whereas the SKSOO.B drive has a two-platter design.

We tested these drives with Windows Vista, an Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 processor @ 2.66 GHz and 2 GB of DDR 2 memory. The benchmarks for these drives include HD Tach RW, SiSoft Sandra 2009. SP2, 4 GB file transfer tests and a 1-GB Photoshop scratch disk test. In these benchmarks, the 5K5OO showed better overall performance in read and write tests in comparison to the 5K5OO.B. The CPU utilization of the 5K5OO drive is less. The only place where the SKSOO.B shines is the burst speed - 246.5 MBps in comparison to 184.6 MBps. The higher the burst speed, the faster you will be able to open up files and applications.

When it comes to real world tests, the 5K5OO.B outperforms the 5K5OO by quite a margin. With our real world file transfer tests, we found the average read and write speeds of the 5K5OO drive to be 41.92 MBps and 58.23 MBps, respectively. In comparison, the 5K5OO. B gave us average read and write speeds of 58.17 MBps and 61.98 MBps, respectively. These scores clearly show why the 5K5OO. B is the superior drive.