Hitachi Travelstar 5K500.B. Now in 9.5mm

[GeeYouEye]

It appears that Hitachi is actually finally shipping their 2-platter 9.5mm Z-height 500 GB drive in the US: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145257 . Now, their 12.5mm drive, the 5K500 (no .B) had fairly mediocre performance, actually performing worse than the 320GB 2-platter drive at the same speed (5400 RPM) in some cases. Has anyone bought one of these, and if so, is it as good as the Travelstar has usually been, not just in terms of performance, but also in terms of noise and battery life (they've supposedly got a much smaller power envelope now; 0.8-1.4 W instead of 1.0-3.0 W).

And if anyone happens to have any experience with this versus the WD Scorpio Blue, your observations would be most welcome.

 

[alphaod]

I thought these have been out of a few months now?

 

[GeeYouEye]

I thought these have been out of a few months now?

They were announced in November, with a ship date of Q1 2009, but they only appeared at Newegg 2 days ago. I haven't seen them anywhere else before, and yes, I have been looking.

 

[worldwide]

I have one of these. I pulled it out of a new 2.5" external HD I bought a few days ago and swapped it with the drive in my MacBook.

It's been good so far. I find it pretty quiet, normal speed for a 5400 HD.

I had a Western Digital 320GB 5400 RPM HD in the MacBook before this one, and I haven't noticed any change in speed or battery consumption with the 5k500.B. I think the Hitachi may be slightly quieter.

I haven't done any tests, though, so these are just my impressions.

Edit:

I was curious and did some looking and found this review:

http://www.i4u.com/full-review-527.html

 

[Jottle]

Another glowing review:

http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=5003

I can't wait to pick this thing up if it's just as whisper quiet as my current mbp's 320gb 5400rpm Hitachi hard drive.

 

[minik]

I picked up the 500GB G-drive mini this afternoon at the Apple Store. The drive itself was formatted in HFS+ Journaled (Apple Partition Map) on 4.14.2009. I kind of hold out for it due to the 5400PRM spin rate. However, this external drive is mainly for my iTunes library, so 5400PRM shouldn't be an issue at all.

Disk Utility reports Hitachi HTS545050B9A300 as the drive model, so far it is pretty speedy via Firewire 800. Although it only offers 8MB of cache, I am happy with it.