7200RPM 500GB, 7K500, Seagate 7200.4, Scopin Black real word compare

I am used to have 2 HDDs in my laptop to have 1TB space. I tried hard drive sfrom seagate, WD, hitachi, I want to share my real world experience here.

ST9500420ASG (1 Year)
WD5000BEKT (1 week)
HTS725050A9A364 (3 weeks)

All these 3 drives are 7200RPM, 16M cache and 500GB.

First of all, they are all very fast hardrives. I run a few VMWare machine in the same time, I didn't feal any difference in speed, they are all fast and smooth. Then for laptop hdds, what I care most is heat, noise and vibrations. I didn't notice any difference for heat either.

The difference on vibrations is very obvious.
WD5000BEKT > ST9500420ASG > HTS725050A9A364. Hitachi is slightly better than seagate. WD is the worst. I ordered 2 WD HDDs from newegg 1 month ago, but I cannot bare its noise and vibration. Then I called newegg to replace WD with Hitachi. Newegg didn't give me a hardtime as usual.

The difference on noise is very obvious too:
WD5000BEKT > ST9500420ASG > HTS725050A9A364. Hitachi is the queitest one in these 3. Seagate is a little bit louder, but both my 2 seagate hdds started to have some kind of anony "clicking" noise after 3 monthes of use. WD is the loudest hdd in these 3.

When you have two HDDs in a laptop, all noise and vibration would double. My experience with WB HDDs was not good since the very beginning. It sounded like I have two engines in my laptop, and gave me a headache.

Okay that's my experience, hope it's helpful...

 

What was wrong with the Hitachi? Why did you need to get a replacement for it?

 

Good info, thanks.

My experience is similar. WD5000BEKT has an audible hum to it, while Hitachi 7K500 is fairly quiet.

Seagate's new 750GB 7200rpm is also very quiet.

 

Thank you for the subjective test. Do you have any idea or numbers in terms of usage performance? Which is the fastest in terms of multitasking, responsiveness and transfer speed?

 

I replaced WD with Hitachi. I am still using Hitachi.

My seagate 500GB started very quiet. After 3 monthes both seagate hdds started to making anony "clicking" noise. A read a few users have this issue. Lets give new 750GB a few monthes.

My 7k500 is new too, only 3 weeks. It's just so far so good.

I don't feel any difference in transfer speed. But I do feel 7K500 has very good performance on multitasking and responsiveness. I run Vista, XP and Win7 32bit in my Win 7 64bit laptop, which should be consider heavy multi-taksing on HDDs. It seems 7k500 is smoother than seagate. But I don't know if it's because P9600 (7K500, 8GB ram) is much faster than P8800 (Seagate 8GB Ram) ?

 

Since you have three of them, maybe you can do some comparison with high disk intensive test. For example, booting, launching programs and file copying to different partition. I believe 7K500 and WD Black is pretty similiar and Seagate is behind. WD controller is good though, even WD Blue beats some 7200rpm drives with higher IOPS.