320GB 5400RPM vs 320GB 7200RPM drives?

Looking at the Dell M1530. Is the 7200RPM drive worth $200 more?

 

no, it is definitely not worth $200 more. You can buy the 320gb 7200rpm drive for $190 online, which is cheaper than the upgrade cost. Stick with the 320gb 5400rpm drive for a while. Than in a few months, you can sell the 32gb 5400rpm drive for like $70 and then it will only cost you $100 or so to upgrade to the 320gb 7200rpm drives, if you so choose to upgrade.
The 320gb 5400rpm drives are more than speedy enough for most users, and the benefit of the new generation 7200rpm drives is not much of an improvement over the last generation, so stick with the 5400rpm drive. It will be about 80% as powerful as the 7200rpm 320gb drive, which should be enough.

K-TRON

 

I agree with K-TRON but I would keep the 5400 drive and buy a enclosure and use it for extra storage.

 

Why not sell it. Put the thing on Ebay or Craigslist and upgrade That way when you think about it, you have used your 5400 RPM HDD for a while, and your just upgrading for a few extra bucks in a way.

Definately NOT worth 200 bucks. In benchmarks sure the 7200 is a BIT faster but nothing truly noticeable unless your staring at loading screens constantly.

 

I would not buy the 320GB/7200rpm at Dell because:
a. they may very well sell you a Seagate 7200.3.
b. it's too expensive.

The Seagate 7200.3 is outperformed in many sitations by a 320GB/5400rpm WD Scorpio as you can see here.

I would buy the cheapest option from Dell, put it in an enclosure or sell it. And buy a WD Scorpio Black or Hitachi 7K320 yourself.

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136279R

open box but a great price

 

Nice price true, but the 250GB will be slower than the 160GB or 320GB.

 

With coupons and discounts it's probably cheaper. Would the 7200 be worth it if it was $100 more?

 

No because they may sell you a Seagate 7200.3 which is as fast as a Western Digital 320GB/5400rpm.

Just check the benchmarks I posted above.

Why not upgrade yourself?

 

Why would it be slower then the 160GB model, werid platter arangements?

 

the 160gb model uses one platter, so in essence it is exactly the same speed as the two platter 320gb drive. The 250gb drive uses either two disks and three heads, or two disks and four heads, but with limited head movement, so as to get 250gb of usable space from 320gb.

K-TRON

 

K-tron:

I'm not sure you grok how hard drives work.

Nope. In a two platter 320GB drive, you have two platters (four surfaces) being read/written to simultaneously. It won't be twice as fast, but a two platter 320GB drive will be faster than a single platter 160GB drive.

The tradeoff is in several areas: heat, power consumption, initial spinup and higher construction cost for the mechanisms for the second platter. You will likely have a nominally higher seek time as well.

More likely it uses the same construction as the 320GB untilizing three of the four platters. Platter 1 top / bottom, Platter 2 top. With each surface having approximately 80GB the math works out quite conveniently this way.

 

Intresting - Seems to me like the 250GB option is stupid in that they have pretty much the same cost (to both the producers and the consumers) while having 25% less space. Very odd. Anyways this is all good info for me as I am going to need to buy a 320GB drive since Vista makes living with 100GB near impossible.

 

I don't know why but I do know that in Tom' s hardware Drive's charts the 320GB versions perform better than 250GB versions of the same series.

 

Think about it from a manufacturing perspective.

80 GB = 1 platter / one side.
160 GB = 1 platter / two sides.
250 GB = 2 platters / two + 1 side
320 GB = 2 platters / two sides

All of these capacities utilize the same platters.

Is it cheaper to manufacture one density of platters, or two densities of platters?

Now, think about fully utilizing as much of your capacity as possible, ie minimizing rejected platters. So you test a lot (ie a run) of manufactured platters. You find ~15% have one defective side. Throw 'em away, or use them for 80 and 250GB capacities.

Are they really "wasting" the space if one side is defective???

 

I can't speak to specifics, but if you have 4 heads vs. 3 heads operational; you will get better throughput. Here, I've assumed they are using the methods I just posted about.

Cheers,

 

Not all 160 GB uses 1 platter, some are actually 2.

http://www.hitachigst.com/tech/tech...EF5A3B22F08862572D400656432/$file/7K200DS.pdf

 

just becaue a harddrive has 4 heads doesnt mean its faster than a single platter drive with 2 heads. Their is a tradeoff you are forgetting, which is the splitting of the files. In a drive with two platters, the data has to be split and organized, so that it can be read faster later. All of the heads are fixed on an actuator arm so the heads can only write to one part of the disk at a time. In a single platter configuration, the files only have to be split between two heads, rather than 4, which is more efficient, and helps counteract the fact that it only has two heads. In reality, most of the time single platter solutions are faster than the dual platter ones, because they have lower seek times and generally the same bandwidth.
I have tested the 160gb and 320gb versions of the 5400rpm drives, made by the same manufacturer, in the same series and the single platter one usually performs identically in synthetic benchmarks, but has the upperhand in loading times.

K-TRON

 

The Scorpio Black is $180 on Newegg...

What harddrives does Dell use? If I order a 320GB 5400RPM, are they going to give me a Scorpio Blue?

 

Here are some speed comparisons for the two drives in my HP Pavilion dv9207us. As you can see, at least with the 945PM chipset, the difference is worth getting the drive at least as an aftermarket item.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=286668

 

I would not count on it because the WD is not the cheapest.

I know last year Dell was using Seagate drives quite often, but who knows what they're using now. Maybe in the Dell forum they know more.

 

I'm not forgetting -- in fact I'm counting on it.

They aren't split, the blocks are written sequentially vertically. That's the concept of a cylinder.

Block 1 = P1H1
Block 2 = P2H1
Block 3 = P1H2
Block 4 = P2H2

Mix and match as needed to align with the file size.

I would venture that the seek differentials are within the margin of error in the tests. Our inhouse results (on massive arrays) show we get about 10% more throughput on the drives. However, I'm not going to kid myself and say that large enterprise arrays represent the same environment as a laptop/desktop drive.

Only if it is loading very small items in the 1-block range (that'd be 512 bytes). Never mind that synthetic benchmarks aren't the best indicator of real world performance; that's why they're synthetic.

 

John if I were to conceptualize these HDD's with multiple heads as having a similarity to RAID 0 type config but within the primary enclosure. What would be the flaw in that? Is it the sequential aspect you mentioned? Or don't even know where to start?

 

That's not a bad concept at all.

 

John you seem to have much knowledge on this subject. I have followed for months. OK general question, can we short stroke our HDD's for any benefit. If short stroking works why are they not implementing in a hardware way? Making use of the furthest most point on the disks to increase speed?

 

it is worth an upgrade...
but is not worth $200 more!

 

Yes and no. Yes worth it performance gain but not worth $200 can do better on your own. Others are saying 320GB @5400 is good enough. All comes down to preference.

 

So then what good does linking those benchmarks do? They only have the Scorpio. I don't care about theoretical performance. I care that if I ordered an M1530 online, would it be worth it to spend $100 to get a 7200RPM drive instead of a 5400RPM one taking into consideration power consumption and heat.

 

IMHO gaining 25 to 40% in throughput is well worth the $135 a WD Scorpio WD3200BEKT costs. According to the technical specs, neither the Seagate or the WD use any more power (and by inference generate any more heat) than their 5400 RPM counterparts.

Why bother wasting a USB port by sticking an expensive flash drive out the side of your laptop for ReadyBoost when your hard drives is twice as fast?

 

Cause the links will show you that some 7200rpm drives are out peformed by 5400rpm drives.

Buying a 7200rpm drive is in no way a garantee for performance.

I will repeat what I've said a couple of times: No in my opinion it's not worth it because Dell may sell you a relatively slow 7200rpm drive like the Seagate 7200.3 (or maybe some obscure Toshiba or Samsung). Ordering your haddrive at Dell is like gambling. The only thing you're sure of is that you're overpaying.

 

You're probably talking about the Hitachi Travelstar E7K100 series, which only has a SATA 1(1.5Gbps) interface. This drive only has a sustained transfer rate of 629Mbps, which is far slower than the 800Mbps a WD BEKT has.

 

No actually I was talking about the differences between the WD3200BEVT and Seagate 7200.3 as benchmarked here:
http://techreport.com/articles.x/15079/4

You'll notice that the 5400rpm WD outperforms the 7200rpm Seagate in quite a few benchmarks.

Even though the Seagate would clearly be faster in HDTune. That's because HD Tune is just a synthetic benchmark.

 

It's a tradeoff. The closer you are to the spindle, the shorter the seeks. The further out you are, the more blocks you get without having to step to the next track.

So if you were to short stroke it, you'd want it to be closer to the spindle.

FYI, this is also why 2.5" drives have better seek times.

Good enough for what is the question begging to be asked.

There's no one size fits all; although in about 2-3 years for laptops I think it will be a question of what speed SSD do you want?

The ones that the Seagate isn't outperformed on are likely tests that latency is a big factor in performance as a 7200 RPM drive rotates 33% faster than a 5400RPM drive.

 

The WD 320 GB 7200 RPM will be the fastest overall though, with low power consumption. Kobalt Computers (Clevo reseller) offers them as the standard 320 GB 7200 RPM, but other companies don't, apparently.

 

Both WD3200BEKT and Hitachi 7K320 are excellent performers.

Some of the benchmarks posted here indicate that the 7K320 might be a little bit faster.