7200 rpm hard drive question

I'm thinking about buying a 7200 rpm hard drive for my notebook. I know that 5 companies currently sell 7200 rpm drives (Toshiba, Fujtisu, Hitachi, Seagate, Samsung). There seems to be plenty of reviews for the Hitachis and Seagates but no reviews for the other three. Can someone with more experience rank the current 7200 rpm drives by overall performance?

 

No need, the reason why those 2 are reviewed more is because of their superiority. Both Seagate and Hitachi are in there 2nd-3rd generation with 7200RPM drives where as the others have recently joined the performance laptop drive sector.

What do you need the new drive for? How big are you looking for, and what applications will you be running? How about we solve your situation by that approach rather than trying to explain the little differences between the drives?

 

The 7200rpm drives available to the public at this time, are the hitachi 7k200 series and the seagate momentus 7200.2 series.
The 7k200 series marginally outperforms the the seagate momentus series.
However, the fujitsu 320gb 7200rpm drive and the 250gb 7200 drive by samsung have just been released to notebook manufactures such as dell and asus. We have not seen any reviews on these two new drives, but I feel that the 250gb 7200rpm samsung drive is faster than the others.
Fujitsu usually comes out with harddrives before the rest of the manufacturers, but be aware of this. Many fujitsu drives are under engineered, and are not so reliable and thus prone to failure.
I would stick to hitachi, samsung and seagate, since they manufacture the most reliable drives on the market.

K-TRON

 

Thanks for the reply. My notebook has a very slow 5400 rpm drive (Fujitsu - why is this a surprise )which is why I'm trying to upgrade to a 7200 rpm drive. Both Fujitsu and Toshiba are supposed to come out with a 320 GB 7200 rpm drive soon, which is why I was looking for reviews for these two companies.

 

A review will probably be available in the next few weeks, perhaps days. It'll be best to compare with present 7200 RPM models for performance gain differences if there are any compared to Hitachi and Seagate. Hitachi is usually late with coming up with larger capacity drives, but will generally outperform the contenders when they do.