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.
With the new Travelstar 5K1500 from HGST we get a lot of storage space at the expense of lower transfer speeds compared to the 7K1000 variant, which we could happily recommend as a laptop boot drive (in case we do not have a SSD already and favor capacity to speed). The transfer speeds are quite decent and the drive maintains a low noise during operation.
The 5K1500 Travelstar also comes with Dual-Stage Actuator technology; the conventional mobile HDDs use only one actuator, a voice coil motor for positioning the read-write head. To hit the smaller moving targets on the platter, while using a single stage it would be like writing with a rigid wrist and fingers while with the second stage acts like our wrist and fingers, allowing us to position the pen more accurately. This new technology was implemented in order to improve head-positioning accuracy for better performance, data integrity and overall drive reliability.
HGST recommends these drives in notebook PCs or gaming PCs (our recommendation would be to install them as secondary drives), but also consoles, blade servers, network routers or for video surveillance. As a real-life test, we have installed the 5K1500 inside our PS3 to replace a 500GB Caviar Black and we have seen a very small performance drop, while the available storage space has tripled, which is a huge improvement.
The Travelstar 5K1500 from HGST is available online for about 115 Euros.
We would like to thank again to HGST for making this review possible!
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Originally Posted by jmke
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 |
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Originally Posted by danwat1234
Yes that's true. Nobody should use a mechanical drive as a system drive, or at least a hybrid drive with 16GB+ of flash.
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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