Hitachi Travelstar 5K160 160GB 2.5

Hitachi Travelstar 5K160 160GB 2.5

Published August 25, 2008 at 01:16:04 PM, by Michael Johnson

Overview

On the test bed today we bring you the Hitachi Travelstar 5K160 160GB 2.5' USB hard drive upgrade kit. This is Hitachi's first perpendicular magnetic recording retail kit. Seeking to fill your portable storage needs with a drive whose footprint is about the same size as an iPod, Hitachi seems to have a winner on their hands. We'll see if that's the case by showing the drive's performance through a series of synthetic and real world tests. Afterwards, you can be the judge if this drive is worth your hard earned cash. Sound good? Ok, let's get going then.

Package

Hitachi packages the drive with a grey plastic USB2 enclosure emblazoned with the vendor name 'Apricorn' on the top. Also included in the box are a USB power cable, and an additional USB data cable, as well as a CD containing Apricorn's EZ Gig II Upgrade & B ackup software. The neat thing about the software is that it allows you to copy everything on your current notebook drive to the new drive with the click of a few buttons. You then can use your old drive in the enclosure as a portable backup drive, and have the 160GB drive as your primary boot disk.

Since this "three step backup" is a feature touted by Hitachi and their marketing department, I will touch on it briefly. The included EZ Gig II Upgrade & Backup software worked exactly as advertised. There were two modes- automatic, and expert, where you have a little bit more granular control of settings. I had no issues with either mode when backing up my existing hard drive. It imaged my system and I was able to boot off the copied drive both times.

The reason I have not devoted more attention to the EZ Gig II Upgrade & Backup software is, while it certainly is nice that it's included, it wouldn't be a feature that would influence my buying decision. I'd buy the upgrade kit because the 5K160 is a good hard drive and there's the added convenience of it coming prepackaged with an enclosure. If I really wanted to take an image of my existing hard drive, I would do so with one of my tried and true pieces of software- Norton Ghost or Acronis TrueImage. Not to detract from Apricorn's product- it's just that the inclusion of backup software wouldn't be something that would make me choose this upgrade kit over something from one of the competition. True, having to purchase Ghost or TrueImage seperately would most definitely increase the price to far more than the $209.99 MSRP of the TravelStar Upgrade Kit, but that is not a cost I would have to incur as I already own both.

I'm more interested in the physical performance of the drive and enclosure, rather than the software that comes bundled with it. As such, the focus of this review from this point forward will be on the drive as a portable storage device, instead of as a disk cloning utility.

Right off the bat, one thing I noticed that may be of issue to some users is that the drive requires the use of two USB ports to function, so if your laptop doesn't have many to begin with (or they are being utilized elsewhere) you may have a problem. For instance, my laptop only has three USB ports, so if I were using a mouse or USB printer, I would have to unplug one of them in order to use this drive. Not a huge deal, just a minor inconvenience.

Setup Method

I ran all of the tests on the drive enclosure while it was connected to my ThinkPad T60 via USB2:

Specifications	Lenovo Thinkpad T60
Processor	Intel Core Duo T2400 (1.83GHz)
Front Side Bus	667MHz
Chipset	Intel 945PM
LCD	15" XGA (1024x768)
Memory	1GB (2x512MB) DDR2 667 SO-DIMM
Graphics	ATI Mobility Radeon X1300 128MB
Operating System	Windows XP Professional w/SP2

The Thinkpad T60 was set to run at full performance by setting the power scheme set to 'Home/Office Desk' with the AC plugged in, meaning that the CPU will not underclock while running the tests. Each test was repeated 3 times to ensure accuracy. Before each test was run, the laptop was rebooted and its hard drive 2006.07.27 is an I/O subsystem measurement and characterization tool, originally developed by Intel. We ran four different tests using IOMeter, consisting of two different tests performed at both 100% read and 100% write. CPU utilization is also measured during each test. To obtain an idea of CPU utilization, we averaged the read & write utilization during each of the Maximum I/O and Maximum Throughput tests.

• Maximum Throughput: This test simulates maximum drive throughput using 64KB packet sizes in 100% sequential order, performed at both 100% read and 100% write.
• Maximum I/O: This test simulates maximum drive I/O performance using 512 Byte packet sizes in 100% sequential order, performed at both 100% read and 100% write.

WinBench99 is a subsystem-level benchmark that measures the performance of a PC's graphics, disk, and video subsystems in a Windows environment. We ran the Disk Transfer Rate test.

HD Tach is a low level hardware benchmark for random access read/write storage devices such as hard drives, removable drives (ZIP/JAZZ), flash devices, and RAID arrays. HD Tach uses custom device drivers and other low level Windows interfaces to bypass as many layers of software as possible and get as close to the physical performance of the device possible.

HD Tune is a hard disk utility which measures transfer rate, access time, CPU usage, and burst rate.

Real World Tests

Note: All of the timed tests were repeated three times, with the drive defragmented and rebooted between test runs. The final score is the average of the three scores.

400MB File Copy Time is measured as the time it takes to copy a 400MB file from the Windows desktop to the root folder of the drive.

400x1MB File Copy Time is measured as the time it takes to copy four hundred 1MB files from the Windows desktop to the root folder of the drive.

35GB File Copy Time is measured as the time it takes to copy a 35GB Acronis TrueImage from the Windows desktop to the root folder of the drive.

IOMeter

The TravelStar takes the prize in the IOMeter tests, but at the price of a higher average CPU usage. Whether the additional .5MB or performance is worth several percentage points more of CPU usage is debatable. The reason that these test results are so high overall is that these drives are being tested as USB attachments, and as such, the USB bus slows things down somewhat while taxing the CPU more than a direct connect hard drive would.

WinBench99

The Hitachi eked out another victory here in the WinBench99 tests. One thing to note was while running these tests, both drives made the USB enclosure pretty warm to the touch.

HD Tune & HD Tach

Since HD Tach and HD Tune perform mostly the same functions, we thought it would be interesting to see how both programs measured the drive, and if there were any differences to speak of. The areas we tested were the drive's Random Access Time, Average Read Rate, and Burst Speed.

Here, in the Random Access Time test, HD Tach and HD Tune report pretty much the same thing.

In the Average Read Rate test, HD Tune reports a fairly lower rate, which may be somewhat attributed to the differences in the way both pieces of software are written.

The same can be said here, for whatever reason HD Tune is off the mark. The difference could also be due to HD Tach utilizing less than 1% of the CPU during its testing, while HD Tune accounted for 12.5% CPU utilization.

File Copy Tests

So far all we've seen so far have been synthetic benchmarks that many critics will argue do not paint the full picture when it comes to testing hardware. Let's move on to the real world benchmarks, which show us some interesting results.

The Hitachi comes out victorious in the single 400MB file copy test, by about 4MB/second which is nothing to sneeze at.

The Seagate roars back in the four hundred 1MB files copy test, besting the Hitachi by four seconds and a little under 2MB/second.

Just for laughs, I decided to run a special file copy test that is not standard at Laptop Logic. I was rebuilding a PC of mine this week, and had a 35GB Acronis True Image backup file of the system in question hanging around. Eager to see how the drives would handle this behemoth file, I set about transferring it over. When all was said and done, the file had transferred to the Hitachi 5K160 in 18 minutes and 59 seconds, which is not bad at all, if not pretty darn impressive! The Seagate trailed behind by almost six minutes in the same test.

Conclusion

I have to say I was pleasantly surprised with this drive. I wasn't expecting to walk away liking the unit as much as I did. It was quick, exceptionally quiet, and light. It wasn't bulky like 3.5' enclosures, which is a definite plus when you don't have a lot of extra space in your laptop bag. I could see myself using something like this in the future, and that's a pretty neat thing when you're introduced to something you may have overlooked the first go-round.

So to return to the question on page 1, is this drive kit a winner? I would answer with a resounding yes.

Recommendation

Availability/Warranty

Product warranty is for 3 years with an MSRP of $209.99.

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Technical Specifications

No specifications are available.