paulphoto's Full Review: HITACHI - HTS545016B9A300 160 GB SATA Hard Drive
A friend of mine asked me to help find a new hard drive for her laptop, HP Pavillion dv9000. This machine has given her a lot of headache with its hard drive issues that went through replacement twice, under the extended warranty. The problem was hard drive's development of bad blocks, where each during boot process required checking for filesystem consistency; software would fail to launch, or the system would just freeze during use because hard drive sporadically fails to respond. After I performed a surface scan on the hard drive, bad blocks were found developed throughout the disk. The HP Pavillion dv9000 is an Entertainment laptop with Windows XP Media Center installed. The hard drive that came in the laptop was Western Digital Scorpio 120GB SATA 5400 RPM; and the two replacement were all recertified, at least the one I replaced. To my surprise the hard drive was fairly new with a manufactured date Nov 2008, with "WD Scorpio Recertified" on it.
After going through several hard drive comparisons, I recommended the Hitach 5K500 160GB 5400 RPM SATA-II. The reason was based on price and my exposure with Hitachi new SATA products. I have been using Hitachi Travelstar 5400RPM on my laptop and am still impressed with its performance even compared with my 7200 RPM Seagate Momentus 100GB.
The Hitachi Travelstar 5K500.B (HTS545016B9A300) SATA-II 5400RPM 160GB
The Hitachi Travelstar family consists of a few members with storage capacity ranging from 160GB to 500GB. The first generation of the SATA-II (3.0Gb/s) was the 5K320 with storage capacity of 160GB to 320GB. Now, with the new generation, designated as 5K500, Hitachi offers more storage space. These are:
5K500.B 160GB SATA (3.0Gb/s) 5400RPM (being reviewed here) 5K500.B 250GB SATA (3.0Gb/s) 5400RPM 5K500.B 500GB SATA (3.0Gb/s) 5400RPM
All three hard drives has the same cach of 8MB, average seek time of 12ms and average latency of 5.5ms. In terms of price, the Hitachi Travelstar is quite compatible with other manufacturers. I bought the Hitachi Travelstar 5K500 160GB for $44.99 as OEM, ordered directly from www.newegg.com, after a $10 instant discount, and with free shipping. Thus, it was quite a good deal. Currently, it goes for $50. The 250GB is $65 and the 500GB is around $95.
Installation
The HP Pavillion dv9000 is quite a hugh laptop; it supports two hard drives. The Hitachi 5K500.B 160GB will be used as the primary hard drive installed in the first drive bay. I removed the bad WD Scorpio 120GB hard drive from the first bay, removed it from the drive tray by unscrewing the four screws and removed the SATA pin adaptor from the hard drive. To install the Hitachi 5K500 160GB drive, I performed the process in reverse order as I did with the WD Scorpio.
The HP Paviilion dv9000 was configured with its BIOS to boot directly from the DVD-RW drive as the first boot device. With a Windows XP Professional SP-3 CD-ROM in the DVD-RW drive, the boot process proceeded automatically. However, during the first few seconds of BIOS scanning, F10 may be pressed to select boot device. An "ESC" could be pressed to go into BIOS. I did go into the BIOS just make sure the clock is set properly and the system has detected the new hard drive successfully.
I configured the Hitachi 160GB into two partitions: 82GB for Windows XP system and the rest for Storage as the second primary partition. Installation went fine, which took about 30 minutes.
Hardware components did not get detected or configured by Windows XP. So I went to HP web site to download hardware drivers. At HP's web site, there were a lot of links designated for HP dv9000 as there were quite a number of these series. I had to download the laptop's chipset, video driver, Network LAN, Web cam, sound system, battery monitor, Lightscribe, etc. Sound driver was the one I had trouble finding, but I got it to work in the end. All components are working properly. Performance: Real-World Usage and Benchmark
This is a single-user laptop. So we initially did not set up any user accounts. The first account created during the post installation process was called Owner, in addition to the system account which was the Administrator. The Owner account did not have a password, and thus boot process was extremely quick. We only installed a few application programs, such as MS Office 2003, Firefox, NERO, DVD Player, Publisher, Photo Editor, Camtasia and Snagit. Windows XP boots and shuts down extremely fast. The 1024MB of RAM also helps speed up the process. Overall, a vast improvement of the sicken WD Scorpio 120GB. Launching a program was also fast; many applications during multi-tasking were quite responsive as well.
To determine numerically how the hard drive performs, I conducted a couple of Benchmark tests, using HDDScan Windows 3.1, HD Tach and SiSoft Sandra 2009. Below lists the results I found from these Bencmarks.
SiSoft Sandra2009: Windows XP Pro [System Partition (80GB)] Drive Index: 52 MB/s Buffered Read: 235 MB/s Buffered Write: 48 MB/s Ave Read: 105MB/s Ave Write: 42.3 MB/s Access Time: 9 ms [Note: A screenshot of this result is available at my benchmark web site and the URL is given at the end of this review.]
As indicated above, the disk yielded a buffered read of 235MB/s, which surprisingly impressive. Its sequential read/write (47/46) MB/s speeds were identical. I also tested the hard drive using HD Tach and HDDScan to determine graphically its sequential read as well as burst speed, as indicated below.
HDTach 3.0.4.0 Burst Speed: 243 MB/s Average Sequential Read: 49.0 MB/s Random Access Time: 17.9ms [Note: A screenshot of this result is available at my benchmark web site and the URL is given at the end of this review.] HDDScan 3.1 Sequential Read started at roughly 63MB/s at the beginning of the disk and decreased smoothly to about 30MB/s towards the 160GB. As indicated by the graph (which can be viewed at the link provided below), the benchmark reveals a very good read surface, indicating an excellent disk's performance compared to its predecessor and even my Seagate Momentum 7200RPM drive. Another nice thing about HDDScan program is that it also performs a surface scan for any bad blocks or sectors; and as the graph below shows, the Hitachi 5K500.B 160GB is quite good.
Actual data transfer rate (reading/writing speed):
To determine its real-world performance, I transferred a large folder containing text and images with a total file size of 1.88GB from an 8GB USB2.0 device. It took 2 minutes and 45 seconds to complete the transfer, yielding 11.4 MB/s. Of course, this is not really an accurate transfer test since the factor is also part of the USB device that could slow down the process. However, internal transfer of the hard drive from the first partition to the second partition using the same folder took 3 minutes and 33 seconds, yielding at read/write speed of 8.826 MB/s . This indicates that internal transfer is low, but still very good.
Reliability and General Usage:
The Hitachi 5K500 160GB is generally quiet during operation; though I can still hear a soft faint sound during read/write operation, but only if I put my ear near the hard drive. In terms of heat, during long hours of use, the Hitachi got a bit warm, but not seriously warm to cause any concern. The drive compartment of this laptop has breathe holes to help dispate heat, and thus as long we place the laptop in such a way that its bottom has air to circulate, things should work smoothly.
Warranty:
Purchased as an OEM (Original Equipment from Manufacturer), there was no indication of warranty, since I only received just the hard drive unit in a sealed anti-static bag with Part Number and Serial Number as well as Model number and drive information on it. At newegg's Web site, there was no such information either. So I went to Hitachi Web site to find out the length of warranty. Warranty length and coverage vary by country and region. I only needed to enter the Serial Number to find out the warranty and selected the appropriate counter/region. For USA, with the serial number (QCC0BV7G), Hitachi indicated the hard drive is under warranty until June 2012, roughly three years from my purchase. It seems that warranty is determined by the manufactured date (which was June 2009). In terms of reliability, Hitachi has been good for the few hard drives I have used. These were for Desktop (the Hitachi 7K500 series), the Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), the 15K RPM, and the 2.5-inch laptop drives. I have not seen any bad ones yet.
Conclusion
The Hitachi 5K500.B 160GB 5400RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s delivered a nice combination of fast read speed, reasonable price and a good storage capacity for a general-purpose laptop. Its internal file transfer is not the greatest, but its fast read speed would handle day-to-day practical application quite well. Compared to my 7200 RPM Seagate Momentus, the Hitachi has a faster read speed and I would judge it better than my Seagate Momentus; though through sustain read/write the Seagate Momentus with its 7200 RPM would keep up a good consistent read/write ability. Nonetheless, for under $50 with a 160GB storage capacity for a laptop, the Hitachi 5K500.B is quite a nice buy.
The Hitachi 5K500.B may not be the fastest laptop hard drive in the 5400 RPM class, it sure is far better than the one it replaced in terms of reliability and dependability. I would recommend this hard drive for anyone looking for a good storage size and reasonable price combined with good performance.
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I invite readers to visit my benchmark Web site to view the benchmark results in graphical form to appreciate the result and performance this little Hitachi Travelstar 5K500.B delivered. The URL is
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