320 GB hard drive recommendation (FFS necessary or not?)

I'm looking for a 320 GB hard drive for upgrading my Dell E6400, where the HD is unfortunately hard-mounted. Overcautious as I am, this drove me towards buying a Seagate Momentus 7200.3 - not because of speed, there is simply no 5400 rpm hard drive with a free fall sensor. Of course, I'll be careful with my notebook and do everything to prevent it from falling down somewhere, but one can never know, I thought.

My notebook came with a 80GB Western Digital HD, the smallest option as I wanted to upgrade it myself, and it simply amazed me with its silence. Dropping in the big one, I was shocked. It's barely louder than my old notebook with its notorious Hitachi Travelstar 40GN, and the noise itself pleasantly resembles a slow-running fan (absolutely no squealing) - but it seems to be twice as loud as the stock HD!

Now I'm facing a difficult decision:
1. Keep the Seagate inside my new notebook, bear the noise (*sigh*) but feeling a bit more safe about my data (well, not everything's that important, I'm just a university student...)?
2. Buy a new HD* and put the Seagate into an external enclosure I already own?

The most important thing is to know if my HD will be safe in everyday situations. Well, I know that without FFS, falling down from a desk will be the sudden death for my HD, and I will do everything to prevent that. But will it still be fine if I, for example, accidentally put it an a table a bit more roughly? I don't know how 350 G shock tolerance translates into real life, but I know that my old notebook had its HD rubber-cushioned and in the new one it will instantly get the full impact, being directly screwed on the bottom of the notebook's case. Of course, my preference is a quiet HD as it is the only thing I hear most of the time (I don't do CPU intensive stuff) - but I hope it can also bear most of the things it might experience during my travelling between home and university.

*) Regarding the "new HD", I'm not sure which one. Hitachi 5K320 is often recommended around here, but the Samsung HM320JI is 5 euros cheaper...I'm looking for low noise and acceptable power consumption, and I also read that about the Samsung's possible clicking...

Can anybody give me some advice as I'm somehow stuck? Thanks in advance.

 

Do people expect their hard drives to be absolutely quiet? I have the 7200.3. The noise is about the same as the low fan. That to me is very very quiet.

What is loud to me... is when the hard drive revs up and spins when crunching data - think when you're burning to a DVD.

 

Is 5 euros really that much to be anything to argue against?

I'd go for the Hitachi 5k320 if you want silence.

 

Hagbard Celine, consider setting the AAM to a less noisy setting. Or use some extra rubber or other material to dampen the noise.

I don't know if you are aware but the FFS only works when your laptop falls when it is on. Pretty useless for the situations I work in.

PS. The Samsung is fine, but I'd take the Hitachi.

 

The FFS is only needed when the HDD is running since the heads are parked away from the platters when the HDD is off. I don't know for sure, but they are probably also parked when not reading or writing.

John

 

I just bought a Seagate 5400.5 320GB drive and it is quiet, as fast or faster than last gen 7200 rpm drives and got G-force Protection (ffs). It did tick the first hours of use but now it is completely silent (maybe some initial calibration for new drives).

Hdtune 3.10:

Max: 67 MB/s
Min: 29 MB/s
Avg: 52 MB/s

Access time: 22 ms
Burst rate: 77 MB/s
CPU usage: 5%

 

I read some reviews on the 5400.5 and it is not as good as i thought. Anyway it beats my old 5400.3 120GB with a big margin (50% faster) and it is very silent.

As for free fall sensors the 5400.5 is available with or without one. I already have a free fall sensor on my 6510b so i really don't need one.

 

Don't mean to disappoint you but iIt's not faster than the latest generation 7200rpm drives. Seagate 7200.3 has average transfer rates of about 70MB/sec and acces times of 15.9ms.

Right, what I meant to say was that the only time I expect to drop my notebook will be when it is powered off. So FFS has no added value to me.

 

Oh right. I would have called that previous gen.

 

transfer rate wise, you are right, it is faster (I have 320GB 5400.5 and 160GB 7200.2) but look at the response time, they did something wrong with the 5400.5 imo, it's way higher than the previous 5400.x versions by a fair margin.

 

I read this test at tomshardware:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/notebook-hard-drive,2006.html

The 5400.5 seems to be tuned for low power not performance, that is it excels i performance per power tests. Comparing the Power usage between models explains the higher access time and lower i/o:

5400.4 Seek/RW/Idle 2.00/2.00/0.60 W
5400.5 Seek/RW/Idle 1.30/1.60/0.68 W
5400.6 Seek/RW/Idle 1.54/2.60/0.81 W
7200.3 Seek/RW/Idle 2.30/2.10/0.75 W

The 5400.5 is 0.24 up to 1.0 watt lower than the other drives when seeking and 0.4 up to 1.0 watt lower on read-write operations.