If you are looking for affordable storage upgrade for laptops/ultrabooks, and do not want to compromise with the performance then just have a look on Seagate Laptop Ultrathin 500GB HDD. It is a slimmer version of regular thick hard drive. Somehow Seagate was able to reduce the thickness making it just around 5mm. It is hard for you to imagine the size, and then just remember about the most common 3.5mm audio jack. Seagate Laptop Ultrathin 500GB HDD is just a bit thicker. Sleek design gives us a good chance for having more space left for other hardware. We are going to review and test today Seagate Laptop Ultrathin 500GB HDD. It is a 5400rpm drive, ideal for day to day usage. 500GB of space is large enough to store video, audio and files. Making a thinner hard drive is also a big challenge.
Slim drives use fewer amounts of high capacity platters. After looking at Seagate Laptop Ultrathin 500GB HDD it seems that we can trust this drive. It is not a SSHD. It is a regular 5400rpm hard drive that can deliver you 100mb/s of max transfer rate. I was expecting SSHD feature here. A small portion of NAND Flash chip would make it faster. That can restrict the performance to some extent. Even after being one of the thinnest hard drives, it is also affordable. Some models under this support Self-Encrypting Drive (SED) with TCG Opal protocol. So if you are looking for security, then you have to go for – ST500LT033. It comes with common 6GB/s sata interface. The drive is capable of offering you 100mb/s of max read and write speed. The cost of this drive is expected around Rs.5300. It is an affordable drive. We will checkout the drive in more detail, but before that have a look on its primary feature and specification.
Features:
- 5mm thickness (30% Slimmer)
- SATA 6Gb/s interface
- 500GB of storage capacity
- Affordable, high-capacity storage
- Compatible with every portable PC with a standard SATA 6Gb/s interface
Specification:
- Interface – SATA 6Gb/s
- Cache (MB) – 16
- Seek Average, Read (ms) – <13
- Seek Average, Write (ms) – <15
- Max. Sustained Data Transfer Rate OD (MB/s) – 100
- Max. Data Transfer Rate (MB/s) – 600
- Bytes per Sector (logical/physical) – 512/4,096
- Load/Unload Cycles – 600,000
- Startup Power, Typical (A) – 1.0
Design:
5mm thickness opens up upgrade possibility for many devices. The last drive that I had tested was 7mm thick. It was slim and good enough to use it like a backup solution. Slim drives offer you wide choice of usability. You can use it in enclosure like portable drives or you can simply add additional drive in your ultrabook to extend your storage space. This drive also looks good. You can see the drive in below image.
Being a slim drive does not mean it will not fit in your existing desktop. You can use it with a drive bay. It is very light. Most of the drive has connectors covered inside the body, and in Seagate Laptop Ultrathin 500GB HDD you can see the SATA connectors are outside the body. They are not very strong. Take care while connecting SATA cables on it. Do not bend it tightly towards down side.
SATA Interface allows a common connectivity standard. Due to which you can use it anywhere you want. You can hook the drive in your ultra-portable by replacing the existing one. Some laptops comes with dual drive support, you can add this one to extend the storage space. 5400rpm might limit the speed to some point, but still it is good enough for day to day usage. There are only two models in the market that comes with 5mm thickness. One is Seagate Laptop Ultrathin 500GB HDD and second is from WD. There is no huge difference in performance.
Performance:
Test Machine:
- CPU Cabinet – Corsair Graphite 600T Cabinet
- Processor – Intel Core i5-3570K CPU @ 3.40GHz (LGA 1155)
- RAM – 4GB Kingston HyperX Blu RAM (2×2) 667Mhz
- Motherboard – Gigabyte Z77X-UP5 TH-CF
- Graphic Card – NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti BOOST 2GB
- Hard Drive 1 – Western Digital 3TB + Seagate Laptop Ultrathin 500GB HDD
- Hard Drive 2 – Seagate Laptop Ultrathin 500GB HDD ST500LT032
- PSU – Antec NeoEco 620C PSU
We ran a few benchmarking test to find out the optimum speed we can get on this drive. We are happy with the results. The drive offers a standard read and write speed between 80 to 90mb/s on Sata 6GB/s interface. The output depends on your usage. If you are using the hard drive only for backup purpose then there are chances that you might get speed higher than 100mb/s. The drive produces low vibration at the time of usage. You can store your videos, audio, games, etc; on the same. Just for testing purpose I had also used the drive as a default location for installing games and application. It offers lag free performance. The drive can heat up a bit fast when you are consistently using it. You can see more test results below.
Manual Copy Paste: I moved around 10GB of DATA from internal partition to Seagate Laptop Ultrathin 500GB HDD. It offered me a 138Mb/s of speed. This was the maximum. It fluctuates but somehow is able to maintain the average of 130Mb/s second.
CrystalDiskMark Test:
HDD TunePro Test:
Conclusion:
Seagate ultrathin 500GB is one of the best affordable storage solution. The price of this hard drive is around Rs 5300 approx. 500GB space is wide enough for anyone to keep their files. Due to thin size the drive becomes ideal choice for ultra portable systems. Data transfer speed is good enough to do day to day job. The drive will surely add more performance to your system. One of the major things it lacks is a SSD cache. There is a similar 7mm hard drive in the market that comes with 8GB SSD Cache. This boosts your applications more. Lack of SSD cache support makes Seagate Ultrathin 500GB hard drive ideal for secondary storage.
Pros:
- Affordable Upgrades for Ultra portables
- Super Slim Design
Cons:
- Space above 500GB not available
