Labs

Hitachi's Travelstar 5K160 range of notebook hard disks is brand new and uses a new hard disk technology called perpendicular recording. As MacUser went to press, this 120GB model was still difficult to find in UK stores, but it should soon be available for around £80 including VAT.

The Travelstar performed well in some of our tests, but it wasn't consistently impressive. It produced the best result in our sequential write test, running at over 35MB/sec, and was only just beaten by the Seagate Momentus in the two read speed tests. It lagged behind in the random write speed test, though, where it was outperformed by even the usually sluggish Western Digital Scorpio.

At £80, the Travelstar can be seen as a good compromise between the expensive Seagate Momentus and surprisingly cheap Scorpio. Its price breaks down to 67p per gigabyte, though, making it only very slightly better value than the Momentus. It's a decent disk, but if replacing your MacBook's startup disk, we'd recommend choosing a hard drive with consistently good performance. Spending a little more on the Momentus will give you more speed, as well as a more space.