HGST Hitachi HTS721010 A9E630 Travelstar 7 K1000 1000 GB HARDDRIVE 2.5 Serial ATA

1. Choosing a drive: I spent a lot of time looking for a replacement drive for my 'Early 2011' 17" MacBook Pro' as the original 500Gb 7200rpm drive had run out of space. Most of the research I did was spent trying to decide whether to go for an SSD, a hybrid drive or this one as a primary drive (I may add a second drive in the superdrive bay at a later date, but that's a different issue). At the time of purchase, this drive was £65 and an equivalent sized SSD £400. In the end, I was so happy with the speed of my original 7200rpm drive, even when it was full, that I decided the massive difference in price between an SSD and this bargain-priced drive was not justifiable. My decision was finalised when a friend happened to use my Mac and appeared impressed by the speed of a 2 year old machine with a full HDD, questioning the move to SSD. From full shut down, my system is fully functioning in less than 2 minutes and manages all but the most demanding tasks with relative ease. There are some users who move a lot of large files around or spend their time primarily editing video, who may benefit from SSD technology, but for me, an occasional photo editor, internet surfer and document writer etc, this drive is more than adequate. I was also put off by some users who had various difficulties updating the firmware etc. on the Crucial SSD M500 drives before they would work properly in a Mac, which sounded like a lot of hassle and headache. 2. The Drive in Use: I have been using the drive for 2 weeks now and am very pleased with the upgrade. It is similar to the speed of my old drive, with possibly slightly faster operation due to the larger 32MB cache and 6Gb/s interface, as opposed to the 16MB cache and 3Gb/s of my older drive. It is only very slightly louder than the stock Mac drive: I never was able to hear my old drive at any time (which actually was disconcerting at times as I find it helpful to know when there is a lot of drive activity in a computer, especially when it seems to be unresponsive), but I do hear the faintest drive noise from this one as it operates. Still very, very quiet though. I haven't noticed any increased heat production or significant reduction in battery life, which were also concerns, (unfounded or not... I haven't tried one), with using a hybrid. I have a lot of faith in these Travelstar drives, as it was the only one of several drives that worked flawlessly in my PS3; I placed one in my PS3 a couple of years ago and it still is going strong. Incidentally, the stock Mac drive also is a HGST, the same brand as this one! 3. Moving your system onto the drive: Another aspect of replacing the drive, which consumed many hours, was finding the best way to transfer my system onto the new drive. Most people seem to clone the drive, but I wanted to perform a fresh install of OSX and transfer all my documents and settings following this. I thought I would describe this below as I found it difficult to find this information on the internet. I bought an external USB hard disk caddy, which I am now using to house my old drive and therefore act now as a backup drive. The data transfer process with OSX Mavericks was fairly simple. You just go to Mavericks in the Mac App store and, if you already have that OS installed, you can click 'download' and it will download the Mavericks installer into your app folder. Once this is fully downloaded, you run it and can instruct it to perform a fresh install onto your new disk (formatted to 'Mac OS Extended (journalled)' in disk utility first), connected via USB in its caddy. Once this completes (took a couple of hours to download the installer and approx. 20 minutes to install it on the new drive), your Mac will restart and boot from the new drive. The new drive then acts as a fresh Mac system, while your old drive in your computer lies dormant. I then used 'migration assistant' in utilities to transfer all of my documents and settings onto the new drive. As I transferred around 400Gb, this took around 7 hours. Following this, I had almost a full clone of my existing system, without having to mess around with any cloning software. I also think the fresh install may have increased the speed of my system a little. The only thing I did notice with this method, which may not happen in a full clone, is that some services required me to fill in my login details and password, as if I had never used them before. However, once I did this, all my previous settings and data were present in all the apps. Everything, including Aperture 3 and iTunes, with their relevant libraries, appear to be working flawlessly. Apps are updating normally from the App store and now I would not know that my system is 'fresh' if I did not know a new drive had been installed. After the migration was complete, it was a case of opening my MacBook and swapping the drive from the caddy with the original drive and rebooting. (there are numerous, easy to follow guides on the internet and YouTube about this; note that you will need some small cross-headed screwdrivers to open your casing and a T6 Torx screwdriver to replace the drive). I found this fairly simple and took 5 minutes, with the right tools. Hope this helps to save others time making the decision and installing the drive. I'll post an update in a few months about the drive's performance. UPDATE: December 2015 ----------------------------------- As well as putting one of these in my MacBook Pro, I also put one into my wife's laptop. After almost exactly 2 years of normal use, hers failed yesterday. Mine is still going, although it has had very light use as, (like I mention above), a few months after I wrote my review I got a deal on a 1TB Samsung EVO SSD for my primary drive and use this drive as a backup now, sitting in the modded Superdrive bay. I'm glad now that I wrote this review as I'll be using it again to install another drive into her laptop. Went for a Seagate Expansion 2TB this time, hopefully it will last longer than 2 years! So disappointed. UPDATE: January 2016 -------------------------------- Falsely accused! After replacing this drive with another in my wife's laptop, I discovered that the problem was not the drive, but the drive cable, as the new drive also failed to function. Apparently this is a problem known to her 2012 Macbook pro. After replacing the drive cable, her MacBook now works fine. This drive still refused to function, but after a full format, is now working again successfully as a backup drive. When the hard drive cable failed, it must have corrupted the drive. I wouldn't buy this drive now, though, as I've found that buying a drive in a caddy is actually cheaper than buying these standalone drives, even though it's the same drive inside! Just got a Seagate Expansion 2TB for around £60, prised open the caddy with a scalpel and installed it in my laptop. Working like a dream. The equivalent standalone 2TB drive was around £80! Crazy logic.

Although this is made by Hitachi, mine was branded HGST - their newly reformed name. Hopefully the reliability issues of all previous Hitachi drives I have owned has been resolved with this new model. Benchmark scores and expert reviews all rate this drive highly. Hitachi - HGST's warranty is only 3 years compared to other manufacturers 5 year warranties these days so it's long term reliability is to be determined. So far I am happy after using this for a month it is mostly very quiet and there is no apparent slow down or bottlenecks encountered with performance thus far. If you are probably going to upgrade this drive in three year time period then I would have no hesitation in saying buy this bargain priced drive now.

Bought this drive to replace the 500GB Hitachi in my 2012 MacBook Pro. This is faster by what appears to be a factor or 2. Probably not so in a proper bench test, but to the casual eye, Excel opens in half the time and some of my bigger spreadsheets open far quicker too. This is a quiet drive when the laptop is on my lap - haven't put my ear next to it but why would I? Can't say I notice any more heat from it either. In my last MBP I bought a 7200rpm drive and that too speeded up my computer, but I did notice the fans being on a lot. Not so with this one. Haven't done a startup test but I'm never around watching it start up anyway. For general day to day use as my main drive, I'm very happy. Was considering the Seagate XT with the SSD combo which is more expensive. Read reviews on that and got conflicting advice. Can't say which is faster, but I CAN say that I don't care if the Seagate is faster because this is as fast as I need. Haven't done any big tests like ripping or converting a movie, but as I wouldn't sit around watching that anyway, I don't really care if this drive can be beaten cos I bet it won't be beaten by much. For general use, this is excellent and well worth the extra few pounds for a faster drive.

The Travelstar 7K1000 is a great little hard drive and is perfect for upgrading or replacing the standard drive in a PS4. It does make an improvement to loading times etc. too and this is probably down to the increased RPM of the drive. For its size it's actually quite fast and very quiet - it can barely be heard in operation. Before installing to the PS4 I tested the drive's performance on a PC and was quite surprised to see it reach 140.4 MB/s read and 126.9 MB/s write. Obviously it doesn't perform well on random read/writes due to it being a mechanical drive but it's probably one of the best on the market for it's capacity. If you are looking at the Travelstar 5K1000 or 7K1000 drives then I would highly recommend the 7K1000 drive. It might be a few more pounds to buy but the performance improvement is definitely worth it.

1TB in 2018 sounds like a bad idea, but we are talking about 2.5 inch HDD, HGST is the only choice out there. When personal data is your main storage purpose, HGST seemed to be a good choice. I bought three Seagate 2TB HDDs for my NAS, one of it failed after two years. In the past, I had numerous failed Seagate and WD hard drives, they just failed, no per warnings. HGST, on the other hand, proved to be solid. None of my past HGST HDDs failed. Black Blaze demonstrated this view in a much larger scale. Pros: Reliable. Fast. Cons: Limited capacity, 1TB max. Pricy. Interestingly, it took me four rounds to finally have the drive in place. I bought the first one as a warehouse deal for a 5K1000, it shipped with the wrong item. So wrong that it's not only larger, 3.5 inch, but also faster, 15000RPM, the worst part, it's smaller, only 600GB. I was almost temped to keep this babe but the good man inside told me not to, come on, it won't even fit the 2.5 inch NAS. So I returned it, and bought a new 7K1000 straight away. It arrived in my garden, maybe I should say it landed in my garden. The drive is brand new and sealed, but S.M.A.R.T. showed a lot of reallocated sectors. It must has been damaged by the delivery man throwing it to my garden. So I returned again, and bought a warehouse deal for a used 7K1000. It was INDEED used, it was used so much that has been working for nearly 26000 hours, which converts to about 3 years. This must be some sort of scam to Amazon, replace the old for new. Naturally, I got it returned one more time, and bought a new 7K1000 again. It landed in the garden again, but it was blessed, so far no errors. In all, I cannot believe a hard drive can keep its value for 5 years, somehow I still think it's worth it even in 2018.

I brought this hard drive to use it with the PS3, after the old one was dying (damn you Skyrim!!). It does it's job just fine, and after some months I haven't had any problems with it. Speed is normal for this type of mechanic hard drive, so don't expect anything fancy. I would choose instead an hybrid or a full SSD for a laptop or a desktop (or a 2TB HD if you really need the space), but still perfect for the console.

I have been looking for an upgrade option for the PS4's standard HDD, and this one fits the bill perfectly. Simple to swap the drives over with no issues fitting into the HDD caddy inside the PS4 Performance Wise, it is quicker to boot up the system, and game installs seems quicker too. No noticeable noise or additional heat for that matter. Great value upgrade path, and works perfectly.

OLD REVIEW - UPDATED AT END Item failed on first use, Inkubus shirked responsibility and told me to contact manufacturer. Issue was the drive after 1 hour started to make a terrible noise then after shutting down it was not recognised at all. I have been buying everything off Amazon as its so easy its only when there's an issue that you wish you had bought from a shop as Inkubus have no interest or care. I advise you to look to another supplier at least and maybe buy a hybrid drive as the costs are getting close now. If you buy here maybe you will be lucky maybe not. UPDATE: For clarity I have left previous review as it was I have however added one star to the rating. Inkubus finally sent another drive this one worked, and is working. So all I can say is that I have 50% failure rate maybe the next 10,000 would work ok this review is for MY product and MY experience if you wish to do a reliability analysis then buy the drives and do it! The drive is ok so far I haven't run any processes which require a huge amount of disk access (I will update when I do) so cant say if it helps ease that bottleneck as for the mundane day to day operations there is no noticeable difference if I replace the drive it will be with a hybrid. Manufacturers seem to be stopping making these drives.