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)