Introduction

Last January at CES I was introduced to a new form factor of 2.5" drives. Seagate was developing the drive for an ASUS netbook, but promised the 7mm height would be adapted by other netbook makers before the end of the year. Seagate's Momentus Thin wasn't the first 7mm drive I had worked with, the Intel SSD products were also this same height, but Seagate was the first to shine a spotlight on these amazingly thin drives.

Hitachi didn't wait to see how this market would develop and went straight into action making their first 7mm thin HDDs, the Z-Series. The Z-Series can be broken down to two categories; the Z5 and Z7. These are the 5,400 and 7,200 RPM drives and as you would expect the 5 and 7 in the names make differentiating them apart much easier.

Today we are going to look at the Z5, 5,400 RPM Series drive that matches Seagate's Momentus Thin in platter speeds, but offers more options when it comes to storage capacity.

Let's take a look at the specifications and see what sizes Hitachi offers the Z5 in.