Any Hitachi 5k320 Benchmarks or Reviews?

Couple of questions about the 320GB Hitachi 5k320 Travelstar drive, please.

1. I know it's just starting to ship but I can't find any reviews or benchmarks on it just yet. Do you know of any sites that have this info? All I can find so far is basically Hitachi's press release.


2. I see ZipZoomFly has it for about $180. Don't know much about this company, though. Anybody have experience with them?


Okay, I guess I have 3 questions... 3. I've always had good luck with Hitachi drives and I've heard about the Samsung 320GB drives clicks, heat and noise from the Western Digital 320GB and I've read reviews that suggest I stay away from Toshiba's 320GB. I know it's probably speculation but how do you think the Hitachi drive will be? Should I go for it?

 

Zip zoomfly is a great company, they are essentially like Newegg, except less known. ZZF used to have free shipping on virtually everything under 20lbs, but things have changed over the last few months.
I have bought countless things from ZZF, and I recommend them for purchasing.
I usually shop between ZZF, Newegg and Ewiz, they tend to have the best prices on everything.

As for speed, I would expect the hitachi drive to have similar speeds to the 320gb samsung drives.

In general, Hitachi usually sacrifices sound for performance. Almost every one of their harddrives outperforms samsung, seagate, wd, fujitsu and toshiba's harddrives. The sound difference would not be great, but I would definitely wait a week or two, for some reviews and customer feedbacks.

K-TRON

 

i bought the samsung from newegg and it arrived and ran for all of about 15 min.. heard a loud crack or pop and its was dead. got a rma today and its on its way back so i went for the wd as i have always bough wd drives or seagate otherwise and never had a single wd issue...i have the 250gb in 3 of our other notebooks without a single issue and the wd 320 is super fast for a 320gb 2.5" hdd

 

I haven't heard much good news about the reliability of the Samsung drives.

 

I am due to receive the Hitachi 5k320 soon for my Sony Vaio SZ79 and will post on how it compares to the 200gb 7,200 Hitachi I have in my other SZ.

 

Yes please report back and let us know, I'm very interested!

 

drummo, that's just the type of comparison I'm looking for!

Where did you get your drive, if you don't mind me asking.

 

Sorry for the delay in posting.
After being out of action for some time I finally got round to fitting the Hitachi 5K320 (5,400 rpm) and have run HD Tune comparisons between it and the 250 GB Fujitsu (also 5,400rpm) it replaced in my Vaio SZ79GN.
I also ran tests on the 200GB Hitachi (7,200 rpm) in my SZ28GN, and a 320GB Samsung HM 320JI (5,400 rpm) in my son’s XPS 1330.
All results are shown below.
While the access time of the 7200 rpm Hitachi is understandably the fastest, the 5K320 is impressive (especially it’s Burst Rate!) particularly when you remember its low power consumption (1.8W read/write power and 0.55W low power idle).
All tests were done with HD Tune configured for “accuracy” – but the specs of the PC’s are all somewhat different so we may not be comparing apples with apples, and I don’t know to what extent this may have affected the results. The SZ79GN has an Intel T9300 (@2.50GHz) with 2GB RAM running on Vista Business; the SZ28GP has an Intel T2500 (@ 2.00GHz) with 2GB RAM but running on XP Pro and the XPS 1330 has an Intel T7700 (@2.40GHz) with 4GB RAM running on Vista Ultimate.


Cheers,

drummo

 

Hi rtrdogs,

I am in Australia and bought my last Sony while on business in Malaysia so I tend to source parts over here and in Asia. Unfortunately many US firms are not willing to ship outside of the USA - which is a pity. Zip Zoomfly seems to be an exception and have the drive at a good price, so if I hadn't been lucky enough to source one locally, I would have approached them.

Cheers,

drummo

 

Thanks for the benchmarks! I bit the bullet (lack of patience got the best of me) and just had to get the new Hitachi drive when Buy.com had them for $145 with another $10 off. I wasn't expecting to buy for another couple of weeks and then all of a sudden they had them back in stock.

You've made excellent comparisons here. They are extremely helpful.

I ran a benchmark on my drive and mine ran about 10 degrees higher than yours in HD Tune. Wow! I feel no heat at all, though, so I'm very pleased.

I posted a new thread about it so I don't know if you want to post your screens over there too because you've gathered so much info there to share that may help others too:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=246116

Thanks for taking the time to run all these tests.

 

Thanks rtrdogs,

You got a REALLY good price on the Hitachi!! Getting good prices is something that we often struggle with here in OZ.

As I mentioned, many US suppliers (including Buy.com) unfortunately won't ship outside continental United States, Alaska and Hawaii - pity because USPS to OZ is very fast and reliable.

The temps of the HDD in my tests have varied quite significantly, depending on how long the PC has been running at the time and seems usual.

What intrigues me is why the burst rate on my drive is so high when all other stats seem similar to yours. That burst rate has been consistently high on several tests of my drive. I'm not complaining, mind you, just interested.

Enjoy the Hitachi.

 

Hei,

Where did you get it from, if i may ask? I'm trying to find a dealer for about two months now and no-one seems to have it in OZ.

Also, can you say anything about noise? I usually am not fuzzed about drive access noise, but rather spinning noise.

Thanks,
Andre.