Hitachi 7K500 Travelstar 500GB 7200rpm 2.5" drive 9.5mm height

"Itching for a speedy and spacious new upgrade for your laptop? Ain't got the cheddar required to pop in a 512GB SSD? Then have a look at Hitachi's latest, a half-terabyte drive that spins at 7200RPMs yet draws just 0.69 watts when idle and 1.8 watts during read / write operations. The Travelstar 7K500 plays nice with the SATA interface and promises 16 percent better application performance than its predecessor, and for the paranoid in attendance, you can rest easy knowing that a BDE (Bulk Data Encryption) option enables users to have each and every byte encrypted as it's written. As of now, it's only shipping in "limited quantities" to top tier OEMs, but whenever it strolls into retail it'll land for $159.99."
http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/01/hitachi-ships-500gb-travelstar-7k500-7200rpms-in-2-5-inch-form/

I expect this to perform better than Seagate 7200.4. Now it's WD's turn.

 

The WD Scorpio 750GB also begins to ship in DE. Don't know how is the performance......
Still waiting for the WD10TEVT......

 

Agree ... too bad that it is still in 12.5mm form for external usage and not within notebooks.

cheers ...

 

If i can get one ill install it in the ODD bay.

 

50 euros on ebay. pretty sweet

http://cgi.benl.ebay.be/HITACHI-P-7...tten?hash=item43994f3865&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14

 

Be careful that is 3.5" !!!

 

Is the new hitachi 7k500 fittable in my M570RU??
That on ebay is it or is the "thicker" version ?? EDIT: already answered

 

Yes the Travelstar 7K500 is 9.5 mm, normal height.

 

but this it doesn't seem to be mentioned right?

 

I've read it somewhere but don't know where.

Anyway, there's no way it wouldn't be because it's a normal two platter drive.

 

I'm glad they finally got it out.

Now we need to wait for some benchies,
I'm sure it will beat out the seagate 7200.4

Now how about the 5K750 they were working on months ago
That was supposed to be 9.5mm thick as well

K-TRON

 

This is really strange: Seagate has been selling similar drives since the beginning of Feb. 2009. It has already been more than 6 months and there still is not any news from WD, Samsung, Fujitsu etc.

Is Seagate ahead of all the other companies this far in technology?


--

 

Just thinking about Seagate. lol

Not sure why this 7K500 is attracting so much attention....

 

Other companies had similar drives back then but just didn't release it publicly. Seagate's 500GB 7200RPM performs pretty poorly in real life situations, despite having the best theoretical performance capability.

 

Because the 7200.4 was disappointing in performance. Hitachi will most likely do better.

 

had a lot of failures some time back (several years) with hitachi drives. the 'hitachi travelstar' were renamed the 'hitachi deathstar'

 

Is there a big difference in temperature when using a 7.2k RPM instead of a 5.4k RPM? I might upgrade

 

Sometimes slightly, sometimes not at all. I've even had 7200rpm drives that stayed cooler than 5400rpm.

 

I believe what you mean is IBM Deskstar series. From 2000-2002, IBM Deskstar series were plagued by click-of-death problems hence the nickname "Deathstar". It started with 75GXP, the 1st HDD using glass platter, and continued on with 3 other "sequels" (60GXP, 120GXP, 180GXP). Only after 180GXP released that the problem seem fixed.

And after that, Hitachi bought the IBM storage division and the rest is history

 

Oh, do I remember those glass platters
The first time I tried swapping heads in my old western digital, to my surprise the disk shattered when the torx screwdriver fell on the platter.

It was quite shocking, cause at the time I have only seen metal platters

When the Travelstar 7k500 makes it into the mainstream and gets cheap I may upgrade. My 7K320 is not exactly fast opening 300mb Cad files.
I may go to SSD for my E1505, but it all depends on what the travelstar 7k500 costs

K-TRON

 

Ha3x, looking back, i think it would be remembered as a funny moment when your jaw dropped, shocked to see the platter splattered everywhere

Btw, as far as I know, the glass platter have different color than the metal one. I once read somewhere, a guy opened his deathstar drive and purposely hit the platter to test whether it's real glass or just BS tech spec by IBM. and the color of the plate is like translucent brown, like negative film.

CMIIW...

 

hello everybody,
where are the performance no.?

is it fully commercialised?
i am also in search of better drive.

 

It seems all of you are concerned with speed... you should look at getting a SSD. + 500GB in your ODD bay. (I just snatched a 500GB 2.5inch disk for 85$ CAD from NCIX.

 

SSDs are still prohibitively expensive to many of us.

 

I look forward to see some benchmarks. At least a decent 500GB 7,2K HDD is out. I would expect a max transfer rate of ~95MB/s if not more, and hopefully 14~15 ms Access times.

 

The Seagate achieves over 100 MB/s but the access time is around 17ms.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=37428&d=1250466004

 

Interesting. Were those Seagates reliable? I've only used a ATA-6 Seagate drive, was a slug and noisy.

 

I've only had mine for a month. No issues (yet)

 

Seagate Momentus 7200.4 has problems with its firmware.

Barracuda 7200.11 (codename TetonST), Barracuda 7200.12 (codename Pharaoh), Momentus 5400.4, Momentus 5400.5 and Momentus 5400.6 share the same firmware architecture which is F3 technology.

Corruption on all of F3 devices usually happens on the SMART Code verifier and G-List (ALT mod). This verifier corruption will make the HDD identified as having 0 byte LBA (same case as "Medium format error" on Seagate SCSI Cheetah family). The solution is the same, do a translator regeneration or clearing SMART value & G-List clearance.

Few cases of 7200.11 ES2 are harder to solve because access to F3 command mode is blocked.

Recently, there's new case of 7200.11 and 7200.12 which is after normally detected by BIOS, no access to data area is given. Access only given to the first few gigabytes of the initial LBA. This corruption caused by head map error on ATA mod.

 

Only the first release had issues. 7200.4 drives are now coming with an updated and improved firmware.

 

I know that, but somehow I still lack of faith for them

 

Glad to see these are out, but I don't regret buying the 7K320 in late April instead. Got a good deal on it and have been able to make regular backups with my 7K160 since then - as well as not have any space worries.

Yeah, I wasn't about to buy a 7200.4 in April lest I get one of the first release ones (fairly likely at the time). The 5K500.B was the only other one I seriously considered at the time. Hopefully this 7K500 won't have any of the issues that plagued the Seagates.

BTW, I think I recall Samsung (or possibly Fujitsu) releasing a 640 GB, 5400 RPM drive recently. Anything new on that?

 

now this is exciting news. my 5k500B's are excellent.

 

I have the latest firmware seagate 500GB and it still have the click and pause. What's really weird with the drive I am using now is, when in stress, it never clicks or pauses, but when idling or browsing the net, it clicks every 2 minutes. Anyways, stay away from the seagate for now. Waiting for my replacement hdd to come on Friday and if it doesn't fix the problem, I'll just return and get a refund to get the Hitachi.

 

Interesting, my 7200.4 has been trouble free and very quiet. You probably just got a lemon.

Perhaps the Hitachi is a bit faster in the benches, but in my own personal experience and my first 7200RPM drive was the Hitachi 7k40, is there all about the same performance wise.

 

So these Hitachi Travelstar 7k500 500GB will SURELY beat the 7200.4 500GB?

Would it be wise to buy this Hitachi? And where can it be bought?

 

I think it will, and be way more reliable. I've a 5K500-B and I'm very happy with it, fast & cool drive.
It will be available in major online distributors such as newegg for sure.

 

i expect so as well.

 

I thought it was released September 1? Why can't I still find one now?

 

I've had the Seagate 7200.4 since the time it first came out with 0 issues. Can you upgrade the firmware on these drives?

 

usually, Seagate doesn't offer firmware upgrades for their HDDs. only on an extremely rare occasion.

 

Anyone come across a place to pick one of these up yet?

 

I second this, anyone knows where to get this super drive?

 

I'am not sure whether this is it?
http://www.tehyoo.com/product_info.php?products_id=4782

It is a UK site however and costs a heady 107 quid

 

What the f? 107 quid? That's not right!

 

Yeah I am not interested personally unless it is circa 60-65 quid tops.

 

Where are you Mr. Travelstar!!!!?

 

It's a race between this and WD10TEVT now. Whichever becomes available first gets my money I think.

 

Hitachi told me that it would be available December!!! Dammit.

 

Unfortunately that 1TB drive is 12.5mm form factor vs the 9.5mm of thee travelstar. I am guessing your laptop takes the bigger drives; lucky you