Introduction

With several OEM wins and a growing retail product line, Hitachi has quietly been chipping away at Seagate and Western Digital over the last few years. Gone are the days of Hitachi making 'me too' products and the company is now firmly in the same league as these long time front runners.

The notebook 2.5" sector is where I've seen Hitachi make the most growth. I don't have any data to back up that claim, but since I work on notebooks quite a bit it is easy to see that a larger percentage have come my way with Hitachi drives filling their bays.

Today we are going to look at Hitachi's fifth generation 7,200 RPM 2.5" notebook drive. The 7K500 HTS725050A9A364 is one of Hitachi's newest drives that feature 250GB platters.

Specifications, Pricing and Availability

The Hitachi 7K500 (HTS725050A9A364) is the first 5th generation 2.5" 7,200 RPM HDD. Hitachi has released the drive in 120, 160, 250, 320 and 500GB capacities. All models are 7,200 RPM, SATA 3Gb/s and feature a 16MB cache buffer with 250GB per platter. Hitachi's 7K500 also features one of the highest shock ratings found in the traditional platter drive market, 1000G/1ms (half-sine wave).

After giving up searching for the Hitachi under the HTS725050A9A364 model number, I started to look for Hitachi 7K500 and found the drive available at Newegg at the time of writing for just 64.99 after a 10 Dollar mail in rebate. This makes the Hitachi 7K500 the lowest priced 7,200 RPM 500GB drives available at Newegg and nearly half the price of Seagate's Momentus XT 500GB hybrid drive. With that in mind, we will give the 7K500 some additional consideration because the price is amazing for this class of hard drive.

Today will be a full on battle between the Hitachi 7K500 and Seagate's Momentus XT on the 500GB front. Both drives represent the pentacle of 2.5" platter drive technology and we have them both in house to see who comes out on top.