Hitachi HTS542525K9SA00

Hitachi has made a point of declaring a new HDD series each time the recording density approaches the next milestone. Here, the HTS542525K9SA00 is the senior product of the new series that comes under the name of 5K250. Of course, the series boasts everything you could have seen in Hitachi’s earlier mobile HDDs such as iridium-manganese-chromium heads, thermal fly-height control, parking on a ramp for protection during reboots, and the power-saving features HiVERT and ABLE. The developer is especially proud of the increased protection against shocks (up to 400G for two seconds) and of reduced noise (in comparison with the previous series).

Samsung HM250JI

The HM250JI is the senior model in the M80S series we are already familiar with, so we won’t dwell upon its features. It is endowed with everything a modern HDD must have like the parking of the heads on a ramp and an exclusive acoustic management technology. The 160GB model of this series did well in our earlier tests and now we’ll see if the larger-capacity HDD is just as good.

Western Digital WD2500BEVS

Finally, we’ve got the recently released addition to the Scorpio series, the WD2500BEVS model. This HDD features a number of exclusive technologies: WhisperDrive technology uses SoftSeek algorithms to minimize noise when seeking; ShockGuard protects the drive’s mechanics and platters from damage; DuraStep Ramp parks the heads off the data zone for additional protection.

The black squares you can see in the photographs of this HDD are used for fastening it in its housing (it was extracted from Western Digital’s external HDD called Passport).