Hitachi Travelstar 2.5-Inch Internal Hard Drive 2-in-1 Notebook PC Upgrade Kit Review
Your laptop does not need to remain bound to the internal hard drive to close it came with. Hitachi has developed a series of kits handy upgrade that allows you to easily exchange in a new drive, then convert the former to an external drive using an enclosure included. We examined a 160GB Serial ATA (SATA) version of the Travelstar 2.5 “Internal Hard Drive 2-in-1 Notebook PC Upgrade Kit, Hitachi, the kit offers higher capacity. At $ 209.99, is a simple, but expensive to get more life from your laptop. (A version of IDE 160GB costs $ 10 less.)
The included 2.5-inch drive, the Travelstar 5K160 is the first notebook Hitachi model to use perpendicular magnetic recording to shoehorn the storage of a possible 2.5-inch, 5400 rpm. Hitachi made a break to share hard drives, providing simple, step by step instructions and all the tools you need except a screwdriver. It took only 90 minutes to clone and replace a 80 GB Serial ATA (SATA) drive on a laptop HP Pavilion DV2000t running Windows Vista Ultimate.
The first step was to replicate existing disk drive of the laptop, which contained data of 74.5GB. We installed the Travelstar drive in the enclosure, connected to the USB port on our laptop, and installed the included software cloning. Cloning has been point-and-click; We have reproduced the disk in 54 minutes without a hitch.
Then we removed the Travelstar drive enclosure, uninstalled the drive from the laptop, and installed the new drive in the laptop. The laptop started perfectly, and all our applications and files were intact. We then installed the hard disk 80 in the outer wall, and connected the box once more to the laptop via USB, it worked perfectly. To test throughput, we transferred a 25.2GB data folder from the laptop to the new external hard drive. It took 25 minutes, showing quite fast.
Our only complaint with the whole process is that the new 160 GB disk is slightly audible during reads and writes, whereas our previous disc was not. But it is a very small price to pay for a spacious new hard drive, twice the size of our origin, with the bonus of a new portable external hard drive.
Hitachi also offers kits to upgrade to 40GB, 60GB, 80GB, 100GB, and 120GB drives, equipped with either IDE or SATA interfaces. The Travelstar kits are expensive compared to buying a stand-alone internal drive and external enclosure, but with them, Hitachi has done a remarkable job to upgrade intimidation easy enough for anyone to accomplish.
Pros
Complete upgrade package; easy to set up; fast performance
Cons
Comparatively expensive; drive slightly audible during read/writes
Conclusion
A foolproof, if somewhat costly, way to upgrade your notebook’s hard drive and create an external hard drive.
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