This is an awesome drive. It’s fast, it’s reliable, it’s very quiet for a performance model, and it’s affordable. Whether you need a new primary drive or want to add a secondary drive to your laptop or desktop, you need some decent 2.5 inch drives for a rack system or a video game console upgrade, or you just want to make a wicked fast mobile external drive, the Z7K500 is a fantastic choice.

If you are reading this review because you are considering purchasing this drive and an empty enclosure separately to make your own external disk drive, I highly recommend doing so over buying a pre-packaged external drive. This is a much faster and much more reliable drive than what is used with most pre-packaged external drives. It’s also more affordable.

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WHY THE TRAVELSTAR Z7K500 OVER OTHER CHOICES???
I’ve historically used two specific 2.5 inch HDDs: the 7,200 RPM Western Digital Black Mobile (formally Scorpio Black) and the 7,200 RPM HGST (formally Hitachi) TravelStar. The reasons why are because when you combine the very fast read/write speed for a laptop HDD, the excellent reliability, the relatively quiet operation for a performance drive, the excellent warranties, and the reasonable purchase prices, you get a versatile drive that is capable of filling various roles. I have used these drives previously as my main laptop drives (now I use SSDs), I currently use these as a secondary laptop drive, and I currently use them as an external drive. These two lines have met & exceeded my expectations in all of these situations.

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DESCRIPTION OF THE Z7K500-500
This specific TravelStar is the second generation Z7K500-500 and is one of HGST’s premium laptop drives. It features a 500 GB capacity at 7,200 RPM via a SATA 3 (6.0 Gbps) interface. It has a 32 MB Cache, quite an impressive processor, and the ability to move data FAST. At only 7mm thick, this can fit in very crammed enclosures/bays and with an advantage of faster cooling than a thicker drive.

This TravelStar Z7K500 also has impressive shock/vibration tolerances for a HDD, and excellent energy efficiency so that installing a high-performance HDD in a laptop does not mean a huge loss in battery life. With an operating temp of 5-60 C, this works well in harsher environments. For those needing encryption, this drive family has numerous specialized offerings (this specific drive, the HTS725050A7E630, is their standard model without the enhanced encryption capabilities.) The high load/unload cycle rating (600,000) should also be mentioned because a laptop’s disk will constantly be put into sleep/suspension and then being brought back online shortly later for the purpose of preserving power, and drives with higher load ratings are generally favored for these applications.

All of the above features are useful for mobile users and this makes the Z7K500 a good chance for both an internal laptop drive as well as a 2.5-inch self-powered external hard drive.

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MY USAGE, USER OBSERVATIONS, & WHAT I REALLY LIKE ABOUT THE Z7K500
This particular drive has gone into a small aluminum external enclosure to use a USB 3 connection.

When I said this drive is FAST***, I was not joking. For a laptop HDD, both the sustained read and write speeds are impressive. In a pretty good quality USB 3 enclosure, I was getting in excess of 125 Megabytes per second…that equates to almost 1 Gbps!!! Peak speeds were even higher. For a 1/2 TB laptop drive you can get for under 50 bucks shipped, that’s pretty darned good. That’s a good bit better data transfer speed than what most of the pre-packaged external hard drives and the OEM internal laptop HDDs can sport.

For a 7,200 RPM drive, this drive does a very good job at dissipating heat. I do not think it gets nearly as hot as the thicker 7,200 RPM laptop drives. If you put this in an aluminum enclosure, the aluminum itself will act as a giant heat sink and rapidly speed up the process of dissipating the heat. This could very well extend the service life of the drive (given excessive heat is correlated with drive failure to some degree.)

Noise-wise, the Z7K500 runs very silently for a 7,200 RPM performance drive (which are generally pretty loud.) These are dramatically quieter than the previous generation WD Scorpio Black and I think these are about as quiet as the slower 5,400 RPM drives.

(((***NOTE that if you are using this as an external hard drive that you will need to use a high/super-speed port such as USB 3.0, Thunderbolt, or eSATA 3.0 Gbps in order to utilize the fast speeds the Z7K500 is capable of. The drive has the ability to read/write data at speeds which are significantly faster than what interfaces like USB 2 or FireWire 800/400 are capable of. Using these slower ports will result in the connection throttling back the drive speed to only run as fast at the max speed of the connection will support [this can be a huge difference; for example, I am getting 125 MB/s from USB 3, and only 40 MB/s on USB 2…that is a TON of time saved with USB 3!!!] So if you go this route, you will need an enclosure, a cable, and a computer that are all capable of using one of these faster interfaces. USB 3.0 is generally the least expensive and most universal of the above-noted possibilities.)))

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BEWARE OF SELLERS ON AMAZON INTENTIONALLY SCAMMING BUYERS
I was relieved when this item showed up and I could see it was clearly a new drive. I was a little unsure of buying this sort of product on Amazon given the commonality of used hard drives that are sold on Amazon as “refurbished” and even “new, unused.” Some Sellers seem to feel that making a few extra pennies at the price of their integrity is worth it, and it’s put a lot of good people into very stressful situations that they didn’t deserve. There are too many sellers engaging in this practice to even start listing names, but I strongly caution reviewing Seller credentials and buying a hard drive from a Seller with a solid return policy in the event you pay for a new drive and a 5 year old used drive shows up on your doorstep. This happens a lot more than you might expect…

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CONCLUSION
There really isn’t anything negative I can say about the Z7K500. However, I do wish that Amazon and Amazon Sellers would be better when it comes to disclosing the details. Specifically, if a drive is used then it should not be sold under the false pretense that it is new. It should be listed in the USED section and not the NEW section because it is NOT a new product. Further, Sellers need to better clarify how the warranty works. They should say outright that there either is or is not any warranty with the manufacturer. The current methods lack so much disclosure that they are almost deceptive. This should change and the Sellers that do change will be the ones getting my business in the future.

Using the Z7K500 as the drive for your external hard drive is a great idea. If you have ever had to pay for data recovery, you know that it’s not always successful but it gets expensive fast regardless (often thousands of dollars.) You also know virtually no hard drive warranties cover data recovery, even if the drive was faulty. By choosing this Z7K500, you are opting for a drive of excellent quality that exceeds what most pre-packaged external drives are capable of, and this can improve data integrity (another part is redundancy…you never want to store any data on one single drive/location if losing it would be a problem…keep a second copy on the computer, on a separate external, in a cloud, or split across a RAID system so that in the event something happens to one drive, you are prepared with a secondary copy capable of providing your data.)

Overall, the Z7K500 is an awesome drive. There are very few hard drives on the market that have this combination of performance, reliability, and value. And that is why I highly recommend it for use in a wide range of situations.

Very please with this HDD. Easy as pie to install in a 2009 model ASUS laptop.
Wife was using laptop, and it kept crashing. I bought her a new laptop for her birthday, and she wanted me to throw away the laptop.
"Let me play around with it. I might be able to fix it."
"NO. THROW IT AWAY."
Ran chkdsk diagnostic and figured out after two days of running that the hard drive was bad. Eventually, Windows 7 wouldn't even finish loading.
Bought this HDD, got it in 4 days, installed it, installed the recovery disks, spent a week updating Windows 7, and all is right with the world.
One thing to be aware of if this is a replacement HDD. You need to update the SATA driver. Force the update. Otherwise, you cannot receive Windows update. It took me 3 hours to figure this out after I installed it.

I purchased three of these drives May 18, 2016. I received them seven days later and each of them had very different manufacturing dates on them. One had a date of Jan 2015 on it and which I finally got around to using earlier this year and it completely died less than three months later. And I cannot get my customer's data off of it. And of course it doesn't have any warranty which I believe should be made MUCH clearer right up front in Amazon's listing. I mean, don't all modern electronic products that cost more than a few bucks have some kind of warranty? Unless they are "used" and even used parts very often have some kind of warranty. This drive is not listed as used, although it probably should be. Unscrupulous sellers if you ask me. Amazon should be ashamed.

I was in a situation that, I couldn't afford a 512GB/480GB SSD or I couldn't live with a affordable 120GB SSD. My HP Envy M6 AMD sleekbook was giving me hard time loading operating system & programs. Some times it required more than 3 minutes to boot in to Windows 8.1! I figured out that, it wasn't a AMD issue, not my RAMs (6GB) are bad. So, to speed up my system, I was thinking about switching to higher speed drive. And I'm glad that I made right choice. At $37, its impossible to get anything better than this. CrystalDiskMark scores jumped from R/W 77mbps/78mbps to 127mbps/128mbps! My all problems are solved now. System is faster than before & 500GB is plenty for me. If you are thinking of buying it, don't hesitate!

Suddenly died yesterday after one month of use in an hp laptop, only 30% space used, just internet browsing use. Bought in January 2017, installed early March. I bought a wd in February 2016, still perfectly working. Disappointing.

Bought as a replacement for the same model in my daughter's laptop. Started making the same noise in just over a year. Eventually replaced it with an SSD, which is a bit more expensive but a lot better on battery life, quieter and faster.

Bought this as a replacement for the OEM Seagate drive that came in the Asus notebook computer I bought 3 years ago. It's unfortunate that computer OEMs have to go the chintzy route and use Seagate drives by default, especially Asus, but that's another story. I installed this drive rather easily and reloaded the software, and there is definitely a difference between the OEM 5400 RPM drives and the 7200 RPM ones. Plus, the price is cheaper than most Western Digital-branded drives. If I can get the same quality or better for less, then why not?