Hitachi Travelstar 7K200

In our initial roundup of 2.5" notebook drives, the parallel ATA Travelstar 7K100 vied with and generally topped the Seagate Momentus 7200.1 when it came to best-of-breed performance-oriented notebook drives. Since then, the industry has progressed along the path from the ATA-100 style parallel interface to the same SATA interface enjoyed by today's newer desktop systems. Seagate's latest SATA offering, the 160-gigabyte Momentus 7200.2, raised the bar for 2.5" drive performance. Hitachi, of course, has not stood still. In this review, we will turn our attention to the manufacturer's latest flagship, the Travelstar 7K200.

The 7K200 leverages continuing refinements in perpendicular magnetic recording techniques to pack 200 gigabytes of data across just two diminutive platters. Also significant is the Travelstar's 16-megabyte buffer, one that doubles that found on many of today's notebook drives. Hitachi specs the drive's seek time at 10 milliseconds.