HGST Travelstar 5K1500 Review

With solid state drives seeing prices drop year over year thanks to economies of scale and shrinking size of the NAND memory chips, it may seem like laptop drives are irrelevant. But in terms of value proposition or cost per GB, SSDs can still only dream of coming down to the levels offered by hard drives. HGST (formerly called Hitachi Global Storage Technologies) has come out with a laptop drive with a 1.5TB capacity, which fits in the laptop friendly 9.5mm form factor. This makes it one of the largest capacity internal laptop drives.

Features

HGST 5K1500 is a 1.5TB laptop internal drive with a 3-platter design

The Travelstar 5K1500 is a 1.5TB drive having a three-platter design with each platter measuring 500GB. For a 2.5-inch laptop drive with a thickness of 9.5mm, this is a first of its kind drive. Thanks to packing in 1.5TB in this form factor, the HGST 5K1500 also happens to be the most dense hard drive on the consumer market currently. It has a rotational speed of 5400 RPM and has a 32MB of cache buffer. This is quite good considering most laptop drives generally come with either an 8MB or 16MB of cache buffer. In terms of interface, the HGST 5K1500 comes with the standard SATA 6 Gbps interface. Out of the 1500GB only 1397GB is available to the user.

The 1.5TB drive comes with a standard SATA 6Gbps interface and has a rotational speed of 5400RPM

Test Setup
Processor: Intel Core i7-4770K
Motherboard: ASRock Z87M Extreme4
RAM: 2 x 4GB GSkill RipjawsX
OS Drive: Intel SSD, 80GB
Source Drive: Kingston SSDNow, 120GB SSD
PSU: Cooler Master 800W Silent Pro Gold
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit
Monitor: BenQ GL2250

Performance
We try and keep a healthy number of synthetic as well as real life tests to give a better idea of the performance. With hard drive tests, no two runs of the same test will give you exactly the same score, so we run three instances of the same test and then average out the scores to be on the safer side.

The first test we did was the ATTO Benchmark test which gave a sequential read score of 106.94 MB/s and a sequential write score of 108.48 MB/s. We followed this test with Crystal Disk Mark 3.0, which gave sequential as well as random read and write speeds. Given below is the chart of the Crystal Disk Mark scores.

For the real-life transfer speeds, we transferred a 10GB single file and an 10GB assorted file from the source drive to the HGST 1.5TB drive. After each transfer operation we restarted the system in order to clear cache. The drive gave speeds comparable with WD Slim 1TB drive and Seagate SSHD when it came to sequential reads and writes. It really shines in the assorted write speeds as well as intra-drive transfer speeds. The comparison chart is shown below.

Sequential file transfer test

Assorted file transfer test

Intra-drive file transfer test

Verdict and price in India
HGST 5K1500 or HGST 1.5TB laptop drives costs Rs. 9,400 which comes to around Rs. 6.72 per GB. This is quite a good pricing when compared with the other laptop drives seen in the comparison above. The drive offers great capacity, good speeds and economical cost per GB. As most PC peripherals sell at a lower price point than the MRP, if you visit your local electronics retailers, you might even get the drive for around Rs 9000-9200 in some places. If capacity is your main concern, this is the drive to go for right now.