INTRODUCTION

   Since current technology focuses a lot in shrinking everything it comes as little surprise to see that most storage media manufacturers nowadays choose to favor the developing of 1.8" and 2.5" media over the far more popular and widely distributed 3.5" ones. This certainly explains the why although 3 years ago the 2.5" HDD with the highest capacity was 750GB (highest capacity 3.5" has 3TB) just 1 year ago we breached the 2TB barrier (highest capacity 3.5" was and still is 4TB) and just a few months ago we also witnessed the appearance of 2TB 2.5" SSDs so it's really only a matter of time before we see 2.5/3TB 2.5" HDDs/SSDs in the market. That being said most people i know still use 500GB 2.5" drives both in their laptops and for their portable needs but since many of them are starting to experience the limitations of just having 500GB we decided to focus a bit on some of the latest 2.5" hard disk drives to hit the market and we will start by testing the latest Travelstar 7K1000 1TB 2.5" SATA III model by HGST.

    HGST, a Western Digital company, is a market leader in enterprise hard disk drives and develops advanced hard disk drives, enterprise-class solid state drives, and external storage solutions and services that are used by large and sophisticated technology companies to store, preserve and manage data. HGST storage solutions have a reputation for quality, reliability and innovation. Our drives are trusted by the world’s high-transactional enterprises, Internet services companies, creative professionals, and consumer electronics and automotive system manufacturers to store the avalanche of new content resulting from cloud computing and services, virtualization, social networks, HD video and mobile platforms. HGST focuses on delivering innovative, customized storage solutions that are an integral part of a customer’s broader systems, infrastructure and application platforms ensuring a storage value proposition that addresses each customer use case and pain point. This consultative approach to storage coupled with technical expertise, a comprehensive customer support infrastructure, world-class operations and a broad portfolio of solutions sets a high standard for product and service excellence. Founded by the pioneers of hard drives in 2003, HGST became a separate and wholly owned subsidiary of Western Digital Corporation in March, 2012. HGST maintains its U.S. headquarters in San Jose, California and is marketed under the HGST brand name.

   The Travelstar 7K1000 may not be the highest capacity model in the HGST line but it's amongst the very few 1TB 2.5" models in the market currently that actually feature a rotational speed of 7200RPM (coupled with 32MB of cache) since 5400RPM has become the mainstream choice for portable drives due to the lower requirements in terms of power consumption. However although drives spinning up to 7200RPM do require a bit more power compared to 5400RPM ones something which is not really ideal for laptop/netbook use at the same time there's no doubt that the difference in speed is more than enough for some people to justify the reduced battery life of their devices and this is what HGST bets on with the 7K1000. Personally i almost always use my laptop when I’m close to an electrical socket so i do prefer to have the extra speed advantage so i was especially glad to see that HGST went against the flow (now anyways) when they announced the 7K1000 a while back. Of course the performance of the drive is yet to be determined by us so let's see just how fast the 7K1000 1TB SATA III HDD really is.