Product Reviews

Laptop hard disks have always been smaller than their desktop counterparts, but capacities are steadily increasing. Hitachi's Travelstar 5K500 is the first to have an impressively large capacity of 500GB, which is just as large as all but the most gargantuan desktop disks.

Unlike some laptop hard disks, the 5K500 had no effect on the battery life of our test laptop. In fact, the laptop

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lasted nine minutes longer in our light-use benchmark with the 5K500 fitted. However, the disk wasn't as consistently fast as Western Digital's smaller Scorpio 250GB. The 5K500 copied large files quickly, but it couldn't keep up with the Scorpio when transferring small files.

Sadly, this hard disk won't fit in most laptops. Most laptop hard disks are 9.5mm tall, but the 5K500 measures 12.5mm, since it crams three 166GB platters into its small frame. The extra 3mm doesn't sound like much, but most laptop hard disk bays won't accommodate it. Chunky desktop-replacements are more likely to have the space than slender ultra-portables, so consult your laptop's manufacturer.

We were excited by the 500GB of mobile storage, but this hard disk is really a teaser of what's to come when manufacturers shoehorn 500GB into a 9.5mm package. It's good value at 34p per gigabyte, so if it will fit in your laptop it's the only way to get this much storage in a single internal disk.