Features & Specifications
The Hitachi 5K500.B has 500GB of storage space and spins at 5400 rpm. The drive is very thin and uses a 2.5-inch form factor making it appropriate for any laptop or netbook that uses 2.5-inch HDDs. The drive has many green features integrated including a halogen-free design and low read/write power specifications. The Hitachi 5K500.B has a 9.5mm thick profile and features optional bulk data encryption technology to encrypt the entire contents of the drive. The read/write power specification for the Hitachi 5K500.B is 1.4W.

Benchmarks & Testing
It never ceases to amaze me at how much storage we can cram into such small form factor devices today. Many of the smaller notebooks and netbooks we have today offer 160GB or less of hard drive space and it wasn't so long ago that even the largest and highest-end systems offered under 100GB of storage.

The Hitachi 5K500.B has 500GB of storage space, enough for 125 hours of HD video, 500 hours of SD video, 178 movies, and 125,000 4-minute MP3s. The small hard drive is a great upgrade to notebooks with enough space inside for a 9.5mm thick drive.

The Hitachi 5K500.B spins at 5400 rpm, which makes the drive near silent, but makes it slower than new 500GB offerings from Seagate that spin at 7200rpm. The green features of the drive make it safer for the environment when you need to get rid of it and produce less pollution in the build process.

To test the Hitachi 5K500.B I will be using a couple synthetic benchmarks and then moving a large folder of files and applications to and from the drive to test real world transfer speeds.

SiSoft Sandra XII
The first synthetic benchmark test for the Hitachi 5K500.B was with Sandra XII. I used the disk benchmark to get a drive index and random access time for the drive. The Drive Index for the Hitachi 5K500.B was 57.48 MB/sec, and the random access time was 15ms. For a bit of comparison I ran the same benchmark on the drive inside my desktop computer with 1TB of storage and spinning at 7200 rpm. The desktop hard drive had a drive index of 74.68 MB/sec and a random access time of 12ms.

Everest Ultimate
I ran the Everest Ultimate hard drive benchmark on the Hitachi 5K500.B to get details on the read speed for the drive. Everest tests several different read speeds and the results were as follows:

• Beginning Read: 81.1MB/sec
• Middle Read Time: 65MB/sec
• Ending Read Time: 38.7MB/sec
• Random Read: 65MB/sec
• Buffered Read: 223.6MB/sec

File Copy
The final test I ran on the Hitachi 5K500.B was a real world test moving a folder containing 5.46GB of data to and from the drive and timing the process with a stopwatch. To write the large folder of data to the Hitachi 5K500.B took 1 minute and 24 seconds. To write the same folder to the main hard drive from the Hitachi 5K500.B took 1 minute 29 seconds.