Hitachi Travelstar 7K500

The Hitachi Travelstar 7K500 is a 2.5 inch high-performance hard drive for notebook computers. This drive is available in numerous capacities ranging from 120GB to 500GB. All Travelstar 7K500s operate at 7200 RPM, allowing data to be accessed at 12 ms, which is faster than the 5400 RPM drives common in many laptops.

This makes the Travelstar 7K500 ideal for multitasking, gaming and other graphic-intensive applications. Hitachi claims 16 percent better application performance than competing drives. The 7K500 connects internally via one SATA 3GB/s connection. For the green conscious consumer, Hitachi has made this drive energy efficient at 0.69 watts when idle and 1.8 watts when in use. This can also help users achieve longer battery life on the road compared to less efficient drives. For the security conscious, this drive can be encrypted with BDE (Bulk Data Encryption), allowing for each byte to be encrypted on-the-fly as it’s written.