Hitachi 7K60 60GB Laptop HDD                   

With broadband Internet becoming more and more common and people downloading larger files more effortlessly computer users often find themselves upgrading their computer hard drives to accommodate this increased demand on their space.

Upgrading a laptop hard drive is slightly more complicated as they are not always available from the same retailers that you would buy a standard hard drive from and they are noticeably smaller than standard hard disks (both in physical size and data capacity).

Hitachi have sent along their 7K60 laptop hard drive for testing which boasts a large 60 GB capacity, a blisteringly fast 7200rpm spindle speed and a huge 8MB data cache, previously only seen on desktop hard drives.

Before we get too deep into our review lets see what the official drive spec's are:

Wow!, that looks impressive.  We can see above that the Hitachi drive should have speeds similar to those of leading desktop drives.  

For our testing we will be using Toshiba's 100GB MK1032GAX drive which boasts similar specs with a higher capacity and higher price tag.

The appearance of both drives is almost identical both front (above) and back (below) the only noticeable differences are the label design, breathing hole placement and the circuit board colouring, blue for Toshiba and green for Hitachi, this shouldn't effect drive performance.

For our "Test Setup" we will be using a Dell Inspiron i9200 Centrino Laptop which has the following Specifications:

Before we can fit the test drives into the i9200 we have to install the pin adaptor which should be supplied with your laptop and can also be purchased separately.  It is worth mentioning that no drives are supplied with this adaptor and you must ensure that it is fitted to avoid damaging your equipment.  The adaptor is pictured here.

Worldbench 5 is an excellent tool for testing hard disks.  It uses real world applications and not the synthetic tests that other review sites use.  This is good because you know that the results you get will be the same as the results you see in day to day use.

The results below are listed in seconds.  The lower the better.

Amazing!  As predicted the Hitachi 7K60 annihilated the Toshiba drive in our test beating it by 1578 seconds or 26 minutes and 18 seconds.  Think of what you could do in that much time!

We can see above that the biggest differences in time are Nero Express and Winzip.  These are applications that rely heavily on the hard disk drive so these differences are hardly surprising.

Conclusion

We are really impressed with Hitachi's commitment to pushing back boundaries in the computing world.  

The drive outperformed our expectations and removed the bottleneck that was previously slowing down a rather powerful notebook.  The 7200rpm really didn't pull any punches and surprisingly didn't drain the battery any faster than the 5400rpm Toshiba.  We managed to get over 4 hours of continuous AVI playback from the battery during testing.

Hitachi have done it again.  The speed and reliability of the 7K60 put Hitachi head and shoulders above their competition and I personally can't wait to see what they have in store for us next.

We have no hesitation in awarding the Hitachi 7K60 The Red Hot Review Editors Choice Award.

We would like to thank Hitachi GST for providing us with the 7K60 review sample.

All trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Copyright © 2005 - Red Hot Reviews