The drive of my (gaming) life (Hitachi Travelstar 5K120 80 GB)

Member Name: DaveAshton

Product:	Hitachi Travelstar 5K120 80 GB
Date:	08/10/09 (29 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Reliable, quiet,

Disadvantages: Nothing

The Travelstar is a fantastic little hard-drive for me, but I don't use it quite in the way it is intended. It is supposed to be used internally (ie inside the case of your PC or laptop), however I use it as an external drive, connected to my laptop using a simple IDE/SATA to USB lead. This is so I don't have to clog up my main hard drive with games, music etc. I have fashioned a metal casing for it, so dust doesn't get into the workings, so I don't advise doing this unless you can come up with your own way to protect the drive's internal bits and bobs.

Performance-wise, I can't fault this little drive. As I mentioned, I use it for gaming, and it's quick enough to cope with anything I throw at it without any freezes, stutters, or anything else. It doesn't get hot, even after prolonged use and not being near a fan, and it's also very quiet. Another good thing is that it's a very quite piece of kit, so if you save your music to it, you won't need to turn your speakers up to 11 to compete with the background noise from the HD. It's also fairly hardy, I've dropped it quite a few times in the past, and there are no ill effects that I can see that were caused by this

The only real problem is the most obvious one. It's only an 80GB drive, so it will get filled quite quick. The Travelstar range includes several different capacities, so if you can buy a bigger one, go for that instead.

Also, like any hard drive, as you save to and delete from the drive, the capacity will slowly diminish. Again, I can only praise the drive on this matter. I've been using the drive since I bought my first laptop in 2002 (the laptop the drive was originally built into), and in the last 7 1/2 years it has only dropped 5.5GB of space. Compared to some drives, this is a very small percentage of lost space over such a large timescale.

As a main hard-drive, it is a bit small, but if you need a secondary drive for storing music, games, videos etc, the Travelstar is ideal.

Summary: Worth buying as a back-up drive, but a bit small to use as a main hard drive

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