Review: Hitachi's Durable Star Performer

Hitachi's Travelstar hard drives are probably the best drives for system builders building rugged laptops. The Travelstar 5K160, which uses a perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) that spins at an ultra-quiet 5400 RPM, might be one of the best.

The 5K160 is a 2.5 inch ATA-7 and Serial ATA hard drive capable of accessing data at 1.5 Gbytes per second with an internal 8-Mbyte data buffer. Hitachi sells the 5K160 at various capacities from 40 Gbytes to 160 Gbytes. The 5K160 represents a second generation of drives out of Hitachi's R&D. All of the recording media used on these drives now have a high density and a sharp state-of-the-art writing capacity that deliver a good bit to error rate performance.

The 5K160 is reliable under most normal conditions. After several months of testing the drive using various laptops, the CRN Test Center found the drive to be extremely quiet as it uses a fluid dynamic bearing spindle motor. The drive exceeded engineers' expectations when it was intentionally dropped, proving to be more rugged than anticipated. According to Hitachi, the 5K160 can achieve a 350 G operating shock.

After a few months of high I/O testing, the 5K160 maintained low heat dissipation at maximum speed. During drive activity, the 5K160 uses 0.8 watts, and this can drop to 0.6 watts at a low-power idle state. The drive arrives with various internal algorithms in its circuitry to maximize power consumption during spinning and circuit use. To achieve low power consumption without sacrificing performance, the 5K160 has a sophisticated voltage regulator for all drive functions.

For high reliability, Hitachi's new PMR media uses a read head made from an iridium-manganese-chromium alloy that is twice as accurate as previous hard-drive heads. According to the company, this makes the drives stable under extreme conditions. Hitachi also uses a unique alloy combination in the PMR media to achieve a high resistance to corrosion.