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5400 RPM & Speed: Hitachi's Travelstar 5K250 and WD's Scorpio WD3200BEVT

Posted April 13th, 2008 by eugene

Since its introduction last summer, Hitachi's mighty Travelstar 7K200 has stood as the only mobile drive capable of delivering true desktop performance in a notebook configuration. Its 200 gigabyte capacity was nothing to sneeze at either. Since then, however, capacities have crept forward, especially in the 5400 RPM sector. The Travelstar 5K250 was introduced alongside the firm's 7200 RPM offering as a slower yet more capacious and more affordable alternative. A few months later, Western Digital debuted the largest mobile drive to date, the 320-gigabyte Scorpio WD3200BEVT. In the pages that follow, we will take a look at how these two 5400 RPM units stack up against other 5.4K and 7.2K units.

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Hitachi Travelstar 5K250

  • 5400 RPM
  • SATA 3 Gb/sec
  • 125 GB/platter
  • 11 millisecond seek time
  • 8-megabyte buffer
  • Available in (GB): 250, 200, 180, 120, 80
Hitachi's first native-SATA notebook drive design, the 5K250 family comes in a wide variety of capacities. Unlike its predecessor, the 5K250 is strictly SATA... no PATA versions are available.
Lowest Real-Time Price (250 GB):
Top of the drive

Western Digital Scorpio WD3200BEVT

  • 5400 RPM
  • SATA 3 Gb/sec
  • 160 GB/platter
  • 12 millisecond seek time
  • 8-megabyte buffer
  • Available in (GB): 320
A new design, the WD3200BEVT is the first mobile drive from WD to feature the 3 GB/sec interface. Unfortunately, this drive is not available in any smaller capacities.
Lowest Real-Time Price (320 GB):

The 250-gigabyte Hitachi Travelstar 5K250 and 320-gigabyte Western Digital Scorpio WD3200BEVT will be compared against the following drives:

Hitachi Travelstar 5K160 (160 GB) Predecessor to the Travelstar 5K250
Hitachi Travelstar 7K200 (200 GB) Current-generation 7200 RPM notebook drive
Seagate Momentus 5400.3 (160 GB) Competing 5400 RPM notebook drive
Seagate Momentus 7200.2 (160 GB) Current-generation 7200 RPM notebook drive
Western Digital Scorpio WD2500BEVS (250 GB) Predecessor to the Scorpio WD3200BEVT



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