5200 vs 7200 rpm?

Hi,

I was just wondering what the difference in battery life and performance would be between the two at this point.

What is the performance gain? Is it noticeable in daily use (ie. note-taking, email, reddit)?

What would be the reduction in battery life? Can someone give me an estimate in terms of percentage or minutes?

Finally, is there a noise difference?

I'm debating between the 5200 and 7200 momentus and scorpios.

 

hm. this looks like it's the standard thread in here. should find a post with same title of around 1-2 weeks back

with same disk-config (same platters, same storage sizes, same controllers) the 7200 use the most power, and give the most performance. and would be the loudest.

but in most cases, differences between manufacturers, platter counts and and such may change that.

i, personally, only use ssd's in notebooks and pc's anymore

but for me, the switch from 5400rpm to 7200rpm back then was an amasing jump, too

 

Right now the best balance between performance and power efficiency is the Hitachi 5K500.B (500gb 5400rpm)
It is the most power efficient drive in its class, and nearly as fast as the seagate 7200.4 in real life application.

If you are a western digital fan, the WD5000BEVT is a good option. It is as fast as the 5K500.B, but it uses more power.

K-TRON

 

what about the reliability ofthe hitachi?

I will look for those threads, I just didn't see any on the front page. Sorry

 

In my experience I have never had a Hitachi fail on me, and I use a lot of Hitachi's. They are generally regarded as the highest reliability drives on the market.
As of late the only drives which have had problems are the seagate's

K-TRON

 

I actually just ordered the Hitachi Travelstar 5k500.b about an hour ago from New Egg, for the exact reason of it claiming to be the most power efficient drive in its class. It certainly doesn't hurt that it is the cheapest 500 GB hard drive they offer; $89.99 and then a $10 mail in rebate on top of that. $80 for a 500 GB hard drive seems like a killer deal. I'm just crossing my fingers that it'll be a reliable drive.

 

what would be the battery life difference between a 5200 and a 7200 drive?

 

From the reading I've done, it looks like it'll be a very minimal difference; somewhere in the neighborhood of five to ten minutes (and even that may have been an exaggeration) longer with a 5400 RPM drive. I am curious about how the Hitachi will stand out against the competition. I'm not expecting any noticeable improvement, but the drive is very affordable. Personally, after weighing the pros and cons of the different speeds, I would go with 5400 until more manufacturers come out with 7200. It sounds like the Seagate 7200.4 isn't quite the performance boost that one would expect. I would trade a small amount of battery life for improved performance since I am plugged in most of the time, but I just wasn't sure what to think about the 7200.4.

You may want to wait for someone else to chime in with some information. I am no authority on this matter

 

i am genuinely interested in the hitachi now....

Anyone have a review here?

 

The only time I've head hitachi drives failed is more than 10 years ago where IBM hdd had glass hdd platters and it shattered in some of the drives.

 

kaltmond has a 5K500.B
he posted in this thread:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=364014

John Ratsey also has a 5K500.B

K-TRON

 

I attach my results for the 5K500.B for HDtune and HD Tach. The latter also shows the WD500BEVT result.

I'm impressed by the 5K500.B's low power consumption (2.3W read / write). I can't find any measurements for the 7200.4's power cosumption and Seagate's data sheet is a bit limited in this respect. They state "slightly more than a 5400rpm HDD" but are they comparing with the latest generation or a previous, less power efficient generation?

See this thread for some discussion about power consumption.

John

 

John, I can't help but continue to stare at the seemingly large gap between the WD and Hitachi access time performance. 2 full milliseconds. If all things are equal in terms of performance, but the WD has a clearly superior access time average, shouldn't that mean the WD will outpace the Hitachi in real-world computing?

 

Access time isn't everything. If you're doing word processing and is getting something from the hdd that's already in the cache, it'll can have 150MB/s read/write and 0.1ms access time. In reality, you won't notice the difference if you're only doing word processing and other basic things.

 

okay, how about if I'm photoshopping large documents for print? ~200mb files? encoding/decoding files audio/video? compressing/decompressing lots of ZIP files? working in 3D design programs? gaming? loading Outlook with a large Outlook .pst files? trying to do a few of those things all at the same time?

obviously basic things don't matter. but for the things I do? I'm assuming it does, as my 3 year-old Dell with the 7200rpm hdd opens everything just as fast as my new hotness, yet the transfer speeds were half the speed of my new machine according to HDTune. the only category the old lappy won in was access speed. gotta be the difference, no?

 

what is the actual power consumption of the 5k500.b. if it can deliver the advertised 0.5w idle and the 1.4w r/w, that could actually make a difference.


Please check my math, but I am getting a x200t, and knowledge of my little brother's x200t tells me he gets ~ 6 hours of battery life

With a 66whr battery, that means the power consumption is 11watts. Wouldn't this actually translate to the hard drive power consumption to be a large factor? If I can shave a watt off... that would mean literally ~ 40 mins of battery life.

 

Encoding/decoding AV files, Outlook with large file, zip and unzip, CAD designs makes very little difference whether you have 20ms access time or 0.1ms access time. SSDs or low access time storage will only affect the speed for a couple miliseconds assuming all device have about the same throughtput.

The only time you'll see a huge difference is for example, you have 100000 1KB thumbnail pictures in a folder. An SSD will load that in couple seconds while hdd will take couple minutes.

My 8 year old intel pentium 2 computer with 10GB hdd can open small program just as fast as my quadcore desktop with a pretty fast hdd (i think faster than all laptop hdds that you can buy).

 

So, access time is only loosely related to the performance?

 

That is the case for majority of the programs. E.g. if you're using Word to type up a document, you'll never notice the difference while you're typing between a drive that has 100ms difference and a drive with 0.1ms access time.If SSDs are used in a server where it requires hi-IO and low access time situation, having a low access time will be very closely related to the performance.

 

For consumer use, is read/write or random read/write the larger indicator?

 

It really depends on what you're doing.

For Word processing, a very slow drive will be enough to function smoothly.
If doing a photoshop edit with a 500MB .psd file, you'll be spending a lot of time waiting for photoshop to open the file.

It's like a ford vs ferrari. If the speed limit is 10miles per hour, then there's basically no difference in the top speed. You do however have the capability to accelerate a little bit faster from 0-10miles per hour.

 

well... lets say for startup time, what would be the most accurate indicator of perforamce?

 

random readspeed and read throughput.

 

and what about real world performance?

I guess I'm wondering why the new seagate 7200.4 seems to lag behind on file transfer, yet seems to benchmark better.

 

It depends on what program you're using. Majority of the programs, access time have little effect on performance of programs. E.g. in games, you'll see very tiny or no performance gain. In a very large data base programs, you'll see a significant performance boost.

If you're using basic programs, you'll not see any difference.

 

but what about the file transfer test?

The 7200.4 seemed to lag behind by quite a bit, yet it seems to have a large amount of bandwidth in synthetic benchmarks.

 

Depending on what you're transferring, the speed may be significantly different.

 

how would a smaller bandwidth perform better in a file transfer? (one large file)

+rep btw

thanks for answering my questions

 

thanks for the insight,, jack.

 

If your hdd has a very large block size with small bandwidth vs an hdd with very small block size, the hdd with large block size with small bandwidth might potenntially be faster.