Hitachi DeskStar P7K500 HDP725050GLA360 3.5-Inch 500GB, 7200 RPM, 16MB Buffer Hard Disk Drive

I have one of these drives in a Mini Stack enclosure. I use it with a Mac Mini. The drive is fast at 7200 RPM. I cant tell a difference in speed between the external USB/Firewire400 drive enclosure and the internal Mac 80gb drive. Ive had it for 1 1/2 years and it still works fine. I only have 2 complaints with it. First, its kind of noisy. It was very quiet when I first got it, but now it seems loud compared to the nearly silent Mac Mini. Second, it runs a bit hot. The enclosure has a cooling fan, but it still gets hot. I will probably swap it for a larger quieter 5400 RPM 1tb drive that doesnt get as hot.

I bought this to add capacity for video and TV recording storage. It installed easily of course. Plug and Play. I used the Hitachi bootable Disk Utility to check that Acoustic Management and Power Management were off to ensure full performance. They were off by default. Good. The drive is largely silent at all times. I get 79Mb/s transfer rates with HD Tach, so no speed issues. The price seems to fluctuate somewhat - so shop around!

Works as expected

I brought this to replace a failed hard drive and decided to take a chance. I did check first to make sure the cables were compatible with the new drive. My old drive was a Sata 150 and although not Hitachi the connections would work for Sata 300 (this drive). Took the drive out of the box and as expected no instructions were provided. Replaced drive with this one using the fixings and cables from the old drive. My PC(Windows XPsp2) came with a recovery disk so loaded disk and installed without a hitch. The drive is quicker and quieter than the previous drive so for me it was a good buy.

Great HDD , no testing on speed etc. but overall good HDD to stick into a computer and get more storage.

This herd drive installed very well

I was surprised to find that no leaflet or fitting guide was included with the product. After a close examination, I was unable to find the jumper which enables the drive to be used as a master or slave.

Easy to fit. You need a Phillips (cross-head) medium size screwdriver & a torx screwdriver (or a drill bit will do) approx size 8 - 10. Google fitting info . Note that in the apple version it is not quite the same for this product and you will need to keep the metal retainer for the new drive. Detached 2 adjacent cables on the left after removing fan cover. Kept tiny 3rd cable on to save damaging it by pulling it (good luck if you try) and lifted & swung out case carefully with thin cable attached and unscrewed drive and popped in replacement. Boot up again on OSX Install disc or your clone back-up (thank you SuperDuper) and format (partition) drive.

Bought this to place in the Zyxel boxy thingy.

I bought a bunch of these drives many years ago - about 8.5 years ago - for a client for use in a warehouse environment (no air conditioning in hot humid summers, lots of dust, and 24/7 operation), and theyve all outlasted the computers they were originally installed in. Theres still 2 machines running these drives and Ive never seen an error. The other drives I bought for arrays in my servers (and I only replaced them to get more room, but am still using a couple for backups). These models are no longer made and Hitachi sold this division to WD, so I presume the quality will drop as a result if WD engineers change the design much. Ive 22 years in the IT field and can say Ive replaced more Seagates and Western Digitals than Hitachi drives (I think Ive only had 1 out of over 100 of these drives actually crash in that last 15 years), so this review may be moot.