HGST Travelstar 5K1500 2.5-inch Mobile Hard Drive Review

Storage/HDD by stefan @ 2013-08-21

With the new Travelstar 5K1500 2.5’’ drive from HGST we get plenty of storage space and a silent drive which can be used in most notebooks, our gaming PCs for secondary storage purposes or in game consoles if we use to install a lot of content on them.

 

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Test Setup and Test Results

Test Bench:

CPU : Intel I5 3750K Retail @ 4.7GHz

CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-D14

Motherboard : ASRock Z77 Extreme6

RAM :GeIL PC3-17000 2133MHz 8GB EVO Leggera

Video : Sparkle X560 Calibre

Power Supply : Cooler Master 850W

HDD : Seagate Barracuda 320GB 7200.10

Case: Cooler Master ATCS 840

 

Out of the box, the drive arrives unformatted:

 

 

Here is a snapshot of the total reported free space by Windows 7:

 

 

 

With the help of AIDA64, we can extract more information regarding the drive:

 

 

 

The Tests

 

AIDA64 Disk Benchmark

 

 

CrystalMark

 

 

 

HDTach

 

 

 

 

HDTune

 

 

 

 

PCMark05 HDD Test Suite

 

 

 

PCMark Vantage HDD Test Suite

 

 

 

 

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Comment from danwat1234 @ 2013/10/24
The high access times is disappointing, 18.4ms. I was hoping since it was a 9.5mm thick 3 platter drive that it would someone have better access times than a traditional 12mm 3 platter drive, but nope.

Interesting about the dual stage actuator. Western Digital did something like that with the first generation 2TB Caviar Black, which yielded superior access times of about 11.8ms. But in the case of the 5K1500 it didn't seem to help performance at all.
It's good to have 1.5TB though and excited to see if hybrid drives will come out soon with 3 platters at 9.5mm thickness
Comment from jmke @ 2013/10/24
in real world applications you won't see the difference between the worst and best results of the access times tests if you use the drive as a secondary data storage.
all the files which benefits most from lowest access times (os, apps) should be on an SSD.
larger files (media, games) can happily reside on a spinning platter. A difference of 4ms won't really show itself in a side-by-side comparison when clicking "play" on a music file
Comment from danwat1234 @ 2013/10/25
Quote:
Originally Posted by jmke View Post
in real world applications you won't see the difference between the worst and best results of the access times tests if you use the drive as a secondary data storage.
all the files which benefits most from lowest access times (os, apps) should be on an SSD.
larger files (media, games) can happily reside on a spinning platter. A difference of 4ms won't really show itself in a side-by-side comparison when clicking "play" on a music file
Yes that's true. Nobody should use a mechanical drive as a system drive, or at least a hybrid drive with 16GB+ of flash.
Comment from Stefan Mileschin @ 2013/10/25
Quote:
Originally Posted by danwat1234 View Post
Yes that's true. Nobody should use a mechanical drive as a system drive, or at least a hybrid drive with 16GB+ of flash.
This is why I haven't recommended it as a system drive. The ideal setup is one 128GB SSD and this drive with adapter which takes place of the optical drive.
Comment from jmke @ 2013/10/25
128GB SSD proven to be too small for gamers/enthusiasts
for mom&dad it's sufficient, but anything else.. 256gb minimum please!

 

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