HGST Travelstar 7K1000 2.5-Inch 1TB 7200 RPM SATA III 32MB Cache Internal Hard Drive 0J22423

I purchased the HGST Travelstar 7K1000 1TB hard drive because I wanted to know what HGST stood for. No, really, I got this drive because the platters spin at 7200 rpm instead of the more common 5400 rpm of most notebook/laptop computer hard drives. That means this drive will be faster at moving the data around. And 7200 sounds like a much more impressive number than 5400. Since I planned on storing photos and videos, I needed a drive with a lot of storage space and the 7200 rpm speed. If I were also planning on placing programs on this drive, I would also have considered some of the hybrid drives from Seagate which have solid state memory sufficient to cache frequently used programs as well as traditional platters that spin at 5400 rpm. But since my needs were for things that wouldn't take advantage of the cache, I bought this instead. Plus, it's really quite inexpensive and it is one of the few 7200 rpm notebook drives available. Installation was very easy on my Lenovo (although your own computer may be more difficult), because all I had to do was open up the case, unscrew and remove the hard drive caddy, unscrew and remove the old hard drive, then put this new HGST in the caddy and reverse the process. In fact, you can feel like a mad scientist by wildly cackling, "Ha! Now I shall reverse the process!" as you do that. Once installed, it's just a matter of making the partition active in Windows. I thought of naming the new partition "Dolly" as in Dolly Partition, but then I realized that none of you young kids would even understand the joke, so I just named the partition Data instead. No, just "Data" not "Data Instead." Sheesh. Anyway, since then, it's been happily working to store my data without any problems whatsoever. It's nowhere near as fast as the solid state hard drive I use to boot the notebook computer, but it's plenty fast enough to play back 4K video streams or load 36 megapixel images into Photoshop. And I just laugh, because it's cheaper than some pokey 5400 rpm drives. So, if your needs are for data storage and you need reasonable, reliable speed without a huge expense, this is the drive you should consider. If on the other hand, you need a drive for both programs and data storage, you should consider either an expensive solid state drive or a hybrid drive that has both solid state storage and 5400 rpm platters. You'll appreciate having the programs load quickly in that hybrid set up while still having good amounts of inexpensive storage space. Just want to make sure you understand that you should get the option that best suits your needs and budget. Oh, and HGST stands for Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, or at least it used to, until they had a deal with Western Digital. So now you know. You didn't think I'd tease that in the opening sentence and not let you know, right?

This is an update to my original review because there have been several complaints about receiving used / refurbished drives being sold as new, or open box. These are fine drives if you get a new on as detailed below. However, you have no idea what a used one as been through and I wouldn't buy one. The 5 star rating only applies to New Unused old stock drives. Hitachi / HGST doesn't make these any longer and they have been bought by WDC so you have to find a drive that has never been used. Be VERY WARY of so-called open box drives. I received an open box drive that had over 10,000 hours of power on time!!! A few vendors open the drive's Mylar casing and test it. These should show 1 Hour or less power on time and ONE Start up power cycle. There are fine. I use Crystal Disk Info to verify power on hours and cycles. It's a free program. You should run it on the newly acquired drive. if the drive was never opened, it should initially show ZERO power on hours and ONE power cycle. If the vendor tested it (this is Ok as far as I am concerned) then it should show ONE or less power on hours and TWO power cycles. IN NO WAY SHOULD THERE BE MORE THAN 1 OR 2 POWER CYCLES OR 2-3 POWER ON HOURS. Anything over that indicates a used drive. With all that said these are fast, reliable and quiet. Hitachi drives were made in their Global Storage Facilities in Thailand which is a top quality facility that they originally acquired from IBM. Make sure you get the SATA 6Gb / Sec drive for the fastest performance. It's an electronics upgrade to the earlier 3 Gb / Sec drives. Hitachi / HGST drives have consistently been rated the most durable by large sate warehousing companies. This was my original review and if you get a NEW UNUSED one it still applies: These Hitachi drives work great. This looks to be the same item as the HGST Travelstar 0S03563 1TB SATA Hard Drive Kit... because I got one of each and they look to be the same drive. I'm not using these as boot drives, but rather as backup and additional storage for the main drive. And I STILL only source Hitachi / HGST drives as the boot drives in all my systems. I prefer the 500GB drives as boot drives.

I bought this for an Asus UL20FT running Linux with a failing 320GB hard drive. That laptop has "only" a SATA 2 interface, but its 300 MB/sec transfer rate far exceeds the sustained transfer rate of the new drive... so kind of a non-issue. I was not impressed with Amazon's packaging (see pic). But the drive appeared undamaged and went in without a hiccup. After reinstalling the OS I saw it reported the drive's temperatures between 95 and 104 Farenheit, which seemed consistent with the touch test. I didn't do any performance measurements but it definitely feels faster than the old drive. Some folks here complained that capacity is not as advertised, but it's normal practice for drive vendors to pretend that a gigabyte is 1,000,000,000 bytes and not 1024 to the 3rd power like the rest of the industry does. Capacity reported by my OS is about 1.015 trillion bytes. Cheap, fast, quiet, spacious and reportedly reliable. I'm very pleased with this purchase. Will definitely update this review if that changes. UPDATE 2016-05-28: The next day I did a SMART extended self-test of the drive and it was clean. Drive temperature got up to 111 F during that, then down to 91 when idle. Manufacturer specs say ambient temp can be as high as 140 so it seems clear that I will be overheating long before the drive does!