Customer Reviews

Hitachi Travelstar 2.5 Inch 500 GB 7200R PM SATA II 16 MB Cache Internal Hard Drive 0S00157

5 star:		(67)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(13)

 

 

Hitachi HD's always deliver amazing performance, and this Retail Boxed 2.5" 7200RPM 500GB SATA II notebook drive does not disappoint! Using HD Tune Pro 3.50 I charted my example from more than 100MB/sec (Actual 108MB/sec) for the highest speed it reads to a low of just less than 50MB/sec, for an average across the volume of 80.5MB/sec. That makes this HD the fastest 2.5" notebook 7200RPM HD I've ever tested, and I've tested a bunch of them--all good mind you, but this Hitachi 16mb Cache 7200RPM 500GB SATA II HD is simply the King of the Hill @ 80.5MB/sec average speed across the whole volume...just incredible!

I have uploaded the image of that performance here at Amazon.com so you can see it for yourselves, because it should be seen to be believed, and I've done that for all of you to see just how good this HD really is. The seek speed is 17.9MB.sec across the volume, which does *not* beat a Western Digital Scorpio Black 7200RPM 320GB HD, but it has less area to cover in terms of overall size, and it is a good 15-20MB/sec slower overall than the Hitachi is, @ just over 64/MB/sec for its top speed.

The other nice characteristic of Hitachi notebook HD's is their acoustical noise, or rather a lack of it, and this HD doesn't disappoint there either, as it's virtually silent as it goes about it business, reading and writing in my Asus UL30Vt-X1 13.3" notebook. In fact I cannot hear a thing from the Hitachi HD, it's that silent, doesn't make even a whirring noise, just is silent as can be for a HD...so Kudos for Hitachi Global Storage for making this the best 7200RPM 2.5" HD in the world today.

I can't stress enough how good this retail boxed HD really is, but with 16GB Cache and a fast 7200RPM speed, it really makes mincemeat out of any reading or writing assignment. And it's a nice package, the retail box itself, of course! There's the HD which is mounted inside the box in its special carrier, to prevent damage inside the box during shipping, and it's also wrapped up in a special "Moisture Proof" Electro-static Bag, which has a big packet of anti-static Silica Gel inside the bag, so Hitachi is taking no chances with the shipment of their precious HD's.

I always prefer buying a Retail Boxed HD also, because human hands don't touch them, they are always secure inside of their boxes in their special carrier assemblies, and this box and packaging is no doubt one of the best in that regard. It comes with a Seal across the top tab and flap, so you can be certain that nobody has opened the HD up and tampered with it, changed it, or stolen it! So that's a good thing too, the Retail Box of this HD itself.

With an average speed of more than 80MB/sec across the volume according to my testing, and a Burst Speed of more than 145 MB/sec, I have never seen a 2.5" notebook HD perform like this, other than a WD Raptor 10K Enterprise HD, of course...one of those will outperform this HD, but that is about it! And that HD is NOT a 9.5mm form factor so it won't fit in a notebook anyway.

This is, at this time, the fastest 2.5" notebook 7200RPM HD in the world bar none, and you can buy it here at Amazon.com in its Retail Box, secure and safe in there away from human tampering and screw-ups, and bad packaging, all of the good reasons to always purchase HD's in retail boxes if possible, so there you go!

I give the Hitachi 500GB SATA II 7200RPM 16MB Cache HD my solid 5-Stars Endorsement and approval, and recommend it over any and all other choices, Seagate, Western Digital, whatever the other choices are they are no match for this HD. This is the best, Hitachi GST's premiere 500GB 2.5" SATA II HD, and you can get it here at Amazon.com for a pittance, and have the best of all worlds: speed, big size, and the security of knowing it's going to come to you in a Retail Box, not a loose packed HD which can get into all kinds of trouble and problems being shipped--not this one!

You will not find a better laptop hard drive for your money.

Keep in mind that most (if not all) laptops will require the 2.5" size. Drives 3.5" are usually meant for desptops. Factor in that this runs at 7200 rpms and has 500gb capacity it's currently the best laptop replacement drive out there for the sub $80 price range.

PROs:
(1) The only alternative to Seagate's 500gb 7200rpm model embarassment (AFAIK). Western Digital does not make a 2.5" 500gb 7200rpm drive at the time of this review.
(2) Will fit my macbook pro.
(3) Does indeed have 16mb cache (memory buffer) - putting this in here as one reviewer [...] was complaining that this has no cache. It does. Look at the hitachi website product descriptor if you must.

Cons:
(1) Really can't think of any.

I primarily purchased the Travelstar(tm) 7K500 due to my concern of the high oscillation level of the OEM supplied 7200 RPM WD 160GB (including the upgraded WD 320GB 7200 RPM drive) in my Dell D Series Latitude. The WD's are quality products (fast, and reliable data transfer); however, the design of the Latitude D Series lacks any HD carriage dampening (HD mounts directly to the notebook chassis and SATA connector w/o shock/vibration dampers). As an Engineer, I was greatly concerned on the long-term effect of rotational resonance which could result in premature component failure). After reading positive comments on the Hitachi 7200 RPM 500GB drive, my hope was that the Hitachi would mitigate the poor Latitude H/D carriage design. The results after installing the Hitachi are superb. I highly recommend this quality product.

I purchased this drive to replace the original in 100GB 5400RPM HDD in my 2006 MacBook Pro, as I had been running low on space for a long time. I decided to replace my hard drive myself, which is not too difficult if you have a little electronics experience. If you want to do this yourself instructions can be found on iFixit.com.

Here's where the problem comes in; if you have an original MacBook Pro (the ones with the silver keys, not the newer unibody ones) the cable that connect to the Bluetooth chip and the IR remote receiver goes directly over where the breather hole is on this drive (which should not be covered). See this image from iFixit for a visual of this cable: [...]

Covering the breather hole can cause the hard drive to fail, and fast, so I had to get a little creative with the cable. I do not recommend doing this.

Since installing this hard drive I have noticed a dramatic increase in the speed of starting up, opening files and shut down on my MBP, and the extra storage is great. However, it's not worth the difficult instal, or the risk of hard drive failure when there are other drives available that work just as well. If you have an original MBP and want to replace your hard drive I highly recommend choosing a different drive that doesn't have the breather hole in the same place.

I have installed two of these 7200 RPM 500GB drives now, one in a Lenovo Thinkpad T60p and one in a Dell D620. I used SiSoftware-Sandra (downloadable free) to check that the disk interface was SATA and the speed of the SATA disk controller. The Lenovo used a SATA Revision 1 (1.5Gb/s) interface, so I downloaded Hitachi's Feature Tool from [...] to change the SATA interface speed, as this drive comes with the default set to 3Gb/s. It's not difficult - you just need to burn the software to a CD, which you boot from, to change the disk settings.
I copied the existing hard drive by inserting this disk into a neat (and cheap) Vantec NexStar CX NST-200S2-BK 2.5-Inch SATA to USB 2.0 External Hard Drive Enclosure (Black) using Acronis True Image Home 2010 software to "clone" the hard disk. If you have an operating system restore partition on the hard drive - true for most Dells and Lenovos - you need to clone that partition to a partition of the same size on the new disk. Acronis will allow you to do this fairly painlessly.
Both of my new Hitachi replacement disks are *fast* and totally trouble free in their new homes. In total, it took about two hours to do the whole thing: about an hour and a half to clone the existing hard drive, about 15 minutes to swap drives over, and 15 minutes to think about things ... :-). I have been using Hitachi Travelstar hard drives for years now and I have never had a problem with any of them. I love the increased performance that this disk provides -- *and* I love not having to look for spaces to back up all of the data that no longer fit on my old drive!

I bought one of these for my Macbook and it's been great... until it started to make horrible noises after eight months. Don't get me wrong -- I understand that if you sell a million of anything there are bound to be a few bad ones in the batch, and that is NOT the source of my complaint.

When I called Hitachi they said that it sounded like the drive was going bad -- send it back and we'll replace it free under warranty.

I've owned Western Digital external drives that have gone bad (a LOT of WD drives that have gone bad...) but they DO offer one nice feature -- when the drive goes bad you can contact the company and give them your credit card number. They'll send you a new drive right away. After you get the new drive you return the bad one, and they credit your charge card.

When I asked Hitachi if they offered a similar program, they said no. I asked them how I was supposed to send back this internal drive full of my data and they suggested that I back it up to CDs or DVDs. This is a 500GB drive -- I would need a forklift to bring home enough CDs to back it up, and my entire small business would grind to a halt while I waited for the replacement. Yeah, I could transfer it all over to an external drive, but...

Of course none of this is a knock about Amazon, which continues to offer superb customer service in my book.

SO... my complaint is not that the drive has gone bad -- could happen to any brand. My complaint is that Hitachi hasn't found a good way to deal with returns if things do go wrong.

OK? OK!

G

3 of these went bad on me in less than a year. I'm a computer expert, and I do take very good care of my laptop, but Hitachi failed on reliability

This drive was great until it stopped working 3 months after I got it. Out of nowhere it started making clicking and grinding noises. Of course, it also doesn't work.

I bought this after a lot of research and could not be happier with the results. The drive is almost completely silent. You have to put your ear to your laptop in a totally silent room to be able to hear it.

It is very fast. I upgraded to this from a 4200rpm hard drive in my laptop, which starts up in a fraction of the time it used to, programs start up in a flash, and I can finally use my firewire 800 port (I have a 17" macbook pro) and have it transfer data extremely quickly. I haven't gotten it up to 800mbps yet, but I believe that is largely because of the write speed of the disc I was writing to.

My computer also performs much faster in general. Icon previews are already there when you open a finder window, no waiting for them to load. Finder windows open and display contents faster. iTunes is more responsive, no lag switching songs. Programs can access data faster, so they perform faster. All in all, if you have a drive that is slower than 7200rpm, upgrading to this drive will be like upgrading from a minivan to a Ferrari.

And last but certainly not least, I now have nearly 300gb of free space...ON MY LAPTOP!!!!! As a video editor, this is invaluable.

I almost gave this 4 stars for ease of installation because I had to go to Best Buy and have the Geek Squad install it, but I realized that had nothing to do with the drive and was entirely because of the design of my (3 year old) Macbook Pro. If you have a newer one, you should be able to install it yourself pretty easily and without voiding the warrantee.

Great drive, nothing bad about it so far, and if it breaks I know it has a 3 year warrantee, and I keep everything backed up with Time Machine, so I am very happy with my purchase. If you need more space and more speed, this is the drive for you.

Let's face it: The majority of you reading these reviews do so because you want to know three things primarily.

1: Is it compatible with MacBook Pro?
2: Does it make a difference in speed with the MacBook Pro?
3: Does it screw up the quiet performance of the MacBook Pro?

The answer is YES to all three questions. That's right, even #3. But don't get concerned; it's only a big deal if you're hypersensitive to sound like I am, or if you got accustomed to your MacBook Pro running so quiet that you question whether it's actually turned on.

To backtrack: mine is a late 2009 MacBook Pro, Apple MacBook Pro MB991LL/A 13.3-Inch Laptop, replete with 4GB RAM, a 250GB hard drive (which I assumed was 320 when I bought it), and all that. IT's a solid laptop as evident in my review. However I had the three concerns above, plus I was running out of hard drive space. I'm a heavy VM user, and my primary VM which so happens to be a migrated PC ("Big Poppa"), is over 50GB. That took a rather large chunk out, then add in all of my other files and I shortly cut the drive space in half. That's when I decided I needed to take a stand and get something done. This drive comes highly recommended as not only fast and efficient but reliable; something I desperately needed.

My process may not be the fastest way to go about it, but it certainly is the most safe. As a side note, Apple was kind enough to post detailed instructions in the support site in a PDF form, so you really shouldn't get lost doing this provided you do what they tell you.

First thing I did was, using my My Book Studio Edition WDH1Q10000 - Hard drive - 1 TB - external - FireWire / FireWire 800 / Hi-Speed USB / eSATA-300, capture a fresh Time Machine backup. I don't schedule Time Machine; I don't change files frequently enough to warrant an hourly or even a daily run, so I disable the automated runs and just do it once a week myself. That process, if I backup the VMs, takes roughly 30 minutes to an hour. Once that was done, I proceeded to power down the laptop, something I don't do regularly.

On the flip side are Phillips screws. They're the tiny kind, so you'll probably want one size up from eyeglass screwdrivers. I happened to have purchased a computer kit that came with various screwdrivers including this size, so I was fine here. Note that three are elongated, and you'll want to pay attention to their positions. Once you pop off the bottom panel, everything is fairly easy to get at. The drive is sandwiched between two shock braces, easily removed with screws. Don't get confused; the screws on top of the hard drive ARE supposed to be there. Removing the single shock brace near the DVD drive will allow you to remove the drive, then just detach the SATA cable, and you're halfway there. You'll want to remove and retain the brace mount screws that are attached to the sides of the drive; for that you'll need probably a T5 torx screwdriver. Home Depot carries this for about 6 bucks or you can find it online if you're not in a hurry.

Attach the brace mount screws to the new drive, then connect the SATA cable, lower the drive into the brace mount (it'll make perfect sense when you see how you removed the other drive), and reattach the open mount. Close the panel and rescrew. You're 90% done.

Power on the laptop with the Snow Leopard CD inserted. This can be an OEM or the original storebought, doesn't matter. Without an OS it will boot from the CD. Here is where you need to pay close attention to the steps it presents. First, it will ask your language; select it. Go forward until it asks you to format the drive to HFS; do so with a single partition. When it's finished, CLICK BACK ALL THE WAY TO THE FRONT SCREEN, THEN ADVANCE FORWARD AGAIN. This step only applies to those using Time Machine to restore from a backup. Why is this important? Because the installer steps won't recognize the new drive as a valid install location unless you do this. No idea why, but it's a known issue apparently. Use the Disk Utility menu option to restore from the backup (the instructions will tell you this). Select your backup drive (it should already be visible), and select the backup you want to restore. Continue, and it will install Snow Leopard and restore the Time Machine backup. It then will reboot.

When you come back up you should be looking at essentially the same laptop you had before, except for a few snags:

- You will need to re-load corporate email in Entourage or other apps.

- You might need to reload personal email in Mail or other apps.

- Applications are no longer "registered" so you may be prompted with permission dialogs to allow apps to run. Some apps may not work at all, like Kindle for Mac, where your registration data gets corrupted and you have to deregister and re-register with Amazon, forcing you to re-download books.

- Any secondary partitions you might have had do not get backed up with Time Machine. As a result, they will not be restored, even though you specified that Time Machine backup the data. You'll need to go into the Time Machine backup, mount those partitions, and manually copy the files over to the new drive. Very annoying.


Other than that it was a smooth process overall. Some other things to note: You will not realize an immediate speed improvement. In fact, I didn't notice anything at all until I used the drive for a couple of days continuously. App loading is about the same, the only area where I saw an appreciable speed improvement was the loading of VMs, and again, not immediately. This makes sense given the VMs are dependent on hard drive access speed; XP on a VM through Parallels literally is screaming fast; faster than physical PCs, which is how it should be. I have not tested Boot Camp as I don't have a need for it, but I will do so anyway, just so I'm familiar with how Boot Camp works.

In terms of drive noise, I have seen others report that the drive is as quiet, if not quieter, than the Toshiba that this replaces. I submit that this is not true. While the Hitachi is definitely a quiet drive compared to others I've used, it is quite a bit louder than the Toshiba. It's not so loud as to be annoying or unbearable or anything; it's a silent "whurrrr" that is continuous from the right bottom quarter of the laptop where it resides. I don't know if this is because Snow Leopard does not actually spin the drive down, and again, it's not annoying or bothersome. I'm just debunking the statement that it's as quiet or quieter than the Toshiba; it's not. With the Toshiba at 5400 RPMs, I could barely hear the thing working unless I put my ear down to the MBP, and even then it didn't sound like anything with the aluminum housing. With this one I can be at a normal distance and hear the drive working, so I know the decibels are a bit higher. It's okay though, it's running at 7200 RPMs and I knew what I was in for.

One other good benefit is that the operating temperature is comparable to the Toshiba. This is an area where this drive really shines. In other 7200 RPM drives, the speed of the drive is a guaranteed cause for the fan to come on and in some cases stay on to keep the components cool. In the case of the Hitachi, the fan hasn't come on once, not even when accessing VMs. A welcome respite to the Toshiba, to be sure.


In short, is it recommended? Absolutely. All I can tell you is not to expect transparent sound, or blazing fast speed except for VM access speeds. If you really want the most out of the MBP, you'll consider this drive though. It gives you the room you need to get stuff done at a speed that makes it worthwhile. Combine this with an eventual upgrade to 8GB RAM, and you'll have a powerhouse on your hands at a fraction of what Apple would have charged you.