INTRODUCTION

   To my knowledge there are currently 4 types of consumers in the PC market, people who care not about cost just as long they can fulfill their needs (professionals and enthusiasts mostly), people who allow cost to be the decisive factor when choosing a device, people who only care about the specifications of a product and finally there are those who are looking to hit the sweet spot between performance and cost (price/performance ratio) or what i like to call the best value for their hard earned money. Roughly two weeks ago we had the latest and fastest 2.5" 9.5mm hard disk drive by HGST on our test bed the Travelstar 7K1000 (1TB SATA III). Now the Travelstar 7K1000 just may be the fastest 2.5" 9.5mm SATA III HDD out there as we speak but it has one small flaw, it only comes at 1TB capacity which although not bad on its own it's really not enough not when there are 1.5-2TB models in the market. Of course HGST is well aware of that so 5 months ago they announced the availability of the Travelstar 5K1500 a 2.5" 9.5mm drive with a capacity of 1.5TB and naturally we just had to check it out as we did.

   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.

   There's pretty much one main difference between the Travelstar 7K1000 and the 5K1500 models and that's the rotational speed of their plates/disks so whereas the two 500GB plates of the 7K1000 spin at a maximum of 7200RPM the three 500GB plates of the 5K1500 do so at 5400RPM (thus the first number in the product line). Both drives share the same amount of cache (32MB) so their only valid/important difference is their rotational speeds. In the end however that 1 difference alone should be more than just enough to separate the performance line (7K) from the mainstream line (5K) so the only remaining question right now is just how long the gap between these two models really is. Personally since 5400RPM drives are becoming more and more popular due to their slightly lower power consumption compared to 7200RPM ones i really hope that it will not be large but let's move on and see.

SPECIFICATIONS AND FEATURES

THE 5K1500

I look forward to the day that we will get a 2.5" HDD sample in retail packaging until then however the normal static-free bag will do.

Although the 5K1500 has three plates/disks inside still it's just 9.5mm thick like the 7K1000.

The model name, part number, serial number, barcodes, capacity, connectivity, speed, electrical specifications, factory roll out date and much more can be seen on the large sticker ontop of the drive.

Standard procedure dictates that all of the components are placed on the interior of the PCB for increased protection.

The usual power and data SATA ports are present at the rear.

I thought it would be nice to put the 7K1000 right next to the 5K1500 so all of you can see that they are exactly the same in thickness although the second has 3 plates/disks.

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 5th of October 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

   Shortly after i plugged the Travelstar 5K1500 into our test rig and finished with the first couple of benchmarks it wasn't really a surprise to see that it was easily surpassed by the Travelstar 7K1000 (just as expected). The thing however is that i didn't really expect to see such performance differences between these two models solely due to the rotational speeds of their plates/disks (5400RPM/7200RPM). That being said we are talking about an average of around 15-20% which is something that most consumers will probably never notice during real world use while others may not even care but for people who place performance above price and capacity the Travelstar 5K1500 is simply not as fast as the Travelstar 7K1000. On the other hand however we must not ignore that the 5K1500 did manage to pass 110MB/s in both read/write and that's not something we can say about most 5400RPM 2.5" drives in the market currently. Drive temperatures is also an issue when we are talking about use with external enclosures or laptops and the 5K1500 did prove to be slightly colder during use than the 7K1000 although not by much.

   Although the Travelstar 5K1500 1.5TB SATA III HDD by HGST is not the fastest drive out there its capacity is not something we see a lot in the market and because of that its price is currently set quite higher than that of the Travelstar 7K1000. So as we speak you can find the Travelstar 5K1500 for USD132.95 inside the USA (Amazon.com) and 117.16Euros inside the EU (Amazon.de) a price which is roughly 30% over the one the 7K1000 model currently retails for. This is perhaps the only real "drawback" the 5K1500 currently has but it's quite new compared to the 7K1000 so i expect the price to drop substantially after a while. Long story short if you are after speed the 7K1000 still holds the crown but if you are after storage capacity the 5K1500 offers 50% more for just 15-20% less performance and since that's a ratio that really can't be ignored the Travelstar 5K1500 1.5TB SATA III HDD grabs our Golden Award.

PROS

- Build Quality
- Overall Performance
- Large Storage Capacity
- Temperatures 

CONS

- Price (For Some)