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.

SPECIFICATIONS AND FEATURES

THE 7K1000

Once again we received the HDD at hand alone closed inside an static-free bag.

Size-wise the 7K1000 is your typical 2.5 inch 9.5mm thick hard disk drive.

As always you can find the model name, company logo, serial number, barcode, part number, capacity, country of manufacture, connectivity, speed (RPM), installed firmware version, roll-out date and several certification and warning logos on the large sticker at the top of the drive.

Turning the drive over we see that once again all of the chips (controller, RAM) are placed in the interior side for increased protection.

At the lower end we see the standard SATA power and data connectors.

TEST BED

TESTING METHODOLOGY

     Thoroughly testing hard disk drives may require time and patience but that's just about it. Of course that doesn't mean that one must take it lightly, at least not when people base their decision on your results. True many choose to only use 2 or 3 benchmarking suits in order to measure the performance of a drive or drives since quite honestly most benchmarking suites do tend to agree with each other (so it's not really wrong) but we always like to take things a step further not because we have to but because we want to be almost 100% certain of the results we get and post in our charts (one can never be 100% certain about anything).

     So in this kind of reviews we will use a total of 7 different benchmarking suites in an effort to bring you the most accurate results across the board. Now the only reason why i say effort is because real-world usage is not always on par with what results one gets by running several benchmarks on a drive and that's mainly because there are many variables at work from ambient temperatures to hardware configurations and even firmware versions. The benchmarking applications we use are the AIDA64 suite (former Everest Pro), HD Tune Professional, HD Tach RW, ATTO, Sisoftware Sandra Pro, the Crystal Disk Mark 64bit and the PCMARK7. These benchmarking tools are the best in what they do and as you will also see later on their results more or less agree. Each test is performed a total of 6 times and then the average is recorded into the charts. Temperatures are recorded using Hard Disk Sentinel and after 45 minutes of continuous testing in a 23 degrees Celsius temperature controlled room. The operating system as usual is a fresh installation of Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate Service Pack 1 with every update installed up until the 25th of September 2013.

TEST RESULTS - AIDA64 / ATTO

TEST RESULTS - HD TACH RW / HD TUNE PRO

TEST RESULTS - SISOFTWARE SANDRA PRO / CRYSTAL DISK MARK

TEST RESULTS - PCMARK 7 / TEMPERATURES

CONCLUSION

     Once again HGST has released a hard disk drive in the market that easily surpasses all the similar products offered by their counterparts (at least the ones in our charts) and that's not really a small feat. Sure you can opt for one of the latest SSHD (Solid State Hard Drives) models to hit the market but these are mostly suitable for use with your OS since caching of files doesn't apply for normal everyday use especially when using the drive to transfer files. Of course for desktop use if you are amongst the few lucky people who are willing to invest on a good SAS card and couple it with 2.5" SAS drives there are many faster solutions available but in that case i recommend enterprise-grade SATA III 3.5" drives since 2.5" ones are not really ment for such use and enterprise grade 3.5" drives even with SATA III connectivity can go head to head with their SAS 6Gb/s brothers. Overall i think that thanks to its speed and very good capacity the Travelstar 7K1000 is the ideal solution especially for laptops that have room for a 2nd drive (at least until we see an 7K1500 or 7K2000).

   At a price tag currently set at USD88.50 Inside the USA (Amazon.com) and at 72Euros inside the EU (Amazon.co.uk) the Travelstar 7K1000 1TB 2.5" SATA III HDD by HGST is really a one way for people who want the best in both speed and capacity. HGST however has wisely covered all the possible bases and so even if you are just after capacity then the 1.5TB 5400RPM Travelstar 5K1500 (review coming up soon) should be more than enough to cover your "portable" needs. As for us well since the Travelstar 7K1000 combines speed, capacity and a rather low price tag it's more than just worthy of our Platinum Award.

PROS

- Build Quality
- Performance (Best In Class)
- Capacity
- Price

CONS

- None