Conclusion
Hitachi and Toshiba had a few more months than Seagate to work on their 500GB 7,200 RPM notebook hard drives, and both did a great job. The Travelstar 7K500 delivers up to 108 MB/s, which is an all-time high throughput result for notebook drives. Toshiba is only slightly behind at 107 MB/s peak. The results are similarly high for writes, and both drives beat their competition, including Seagate’s Momentus 7200.4. Here is our overall performance index:
Our performance index weighs throughput with 50%, PCMark Vantage with 25%, and I/O performance with 25%. The result is clear: the 7,200 RPM drives come out on top. The two newcomers in particular are quite superior at this time. Toshiba is the best choice if you want applications and Windows to start as quickly as possible. Hitachi wins when it comes to handling media, and the 7K500 turns out to be slightly lower on power consumption.
The differences in power consumption are actually worth mentioning, since the gap between the most and least efficient drives has become rather small. There are disciplines in which some drives don’t do as well, but the power consumption ranges have almost aligned. Mainstream drives idle at around 0.7W to 0.9W while the performance drives we reviewed all require roughly 1W in idle. Activity power varies from a bit above idle for limited requirements, such as video playback, to around 3W for peak performance scenarios, such as maximum streaming. Seeing significantly less than 1W idle power for 7,200 RPM notebook hard drives is as unlikely as peak power consumption exceeding 3W. As long as drives are within this range, you shouldn’t spend too much time thinking about power consumption. Real-life differences will be minor.
Your drive selection should mainly be guided by performance and cost as long as no drive manages to introduce significant advantages in power consumption. This review shows that getting one of the two latest drive models, the Hitachi Travelstar 7K500 or Toshiba’s MK5056GSY, is what you want to do. It’s time for Seagate to release a Momentus 7200.5 and for WD to update the Scorpio Black family. The only other option is an SSD, which cost-wise is still out of range at these high capacities.
Update: Since this story was written, Seagate has done one-better and launched its Momentus XT 2.5" drive, which we reviewed.
