BENCHMARKED - Hitachi 7K750

I'm just not a fan of HD Tune. Its results are so different than the other programs.

 

i switched to a pair of these 7k750's and when the house gets quiet i am anxious to see how quiet they are. on initial impression they appear to be significantly more quiet.

their performance is not as fast as WD, though, but not far behind. i value silence more, though.

only issue i have had is that one of them dropped out of the raid 1 array and refused to rebuild itself. i took it out and formated it seperately and it is rebuilt now. if the same drive drops out again its rma time.

 

ok so far i have one complaint about these drives besides one dropping out of raid.

when the drive is idle and i pick up the laptop and flip it around or on it's side or whatever, during the manuever the drive makes a rubbing / grinding noise. i wonder if it's normal and if anyone else can duplicate this? i have 2 drives i raid 1 and only left 1 drive at a time when testing. both drives act like this.

besides this, the drives are a little quieter than the wd scorpios but not by much. i mean, in my case since i have 2 of them it does make a difference. they still sound like a small fan is running constantly. i was hoping they would be dead silent but not quite.

 

do you have wd also?

 

yes and those are packaged up going to rma.

 

The drive is never really idle (for long), this action will guarantee you a head crash (depending how aggressive you are when flipping it...).

If you want to do this to your running system, you need an SSD.

 

I'm unaware if 7K750's have free fall sensor but even on my 7200.4 with free fall sensor it makes the same grinding noise when flipping my laptop over when it's powered on. I don't do it often, only a few times when shutting down the laptop without it fully powered down I flip the laptop over a bit too fast.

 

no no, i have never had this occur with WD drives. i mean, simply relocating the laptop from a desk to your couch will make the grinding noise. i guess it is normal for this drive but it is kind of silly to require a shut down before moving the laptop around.

 

Neither of my Hitachi's have given me the grind when I move my laptop.

 

Don't need to shut down - just be more delicate than rotating the notebook fast enough to feel/hear this 'grind'.

 

close the lid. lift up the laptop and rotate to hold it like a notebook between your arm and body. just doing something simple like that will create the grind.

i had 4 WD 320gb 5400rpm drives and 2 samsung 1tb 5400rpm drives and they never grinded during when incurring normal gforces.

 

Sorry, I'm not having the same experience as you. My Hitachi's are a dream. This was first in an enclosure, during data transfer and testing. It made no noises when I moved it or changed the plane of rotation. I just folded up my VAIO and turned it on side and rotated it - all with my ear near the HDD - and no grinding sound happened.

 

I don't have grinding either. I move the laptop quite often from room to room without shutting it down, just carrying it sideways.

 

i am not sure if it is a grind or a simple harmless whine noise during the normal rotation. i would label these as simply poor build quality.

 

Youtube video of drive "grinding". Turn up the volume because my phone didn't auto compensate for the quietness of the drive.

I also did some benches with the drive in the USB 3 enclosure from the video and the results are impressive.

 

that is exactly the noise, lol.

but i have "good" news regarding this. i tested the 7200rpm 750gb versoins of all avialable drives, WD, 7k750, and seagate momentus. they ALL make this noise with rotation!

 

I thought it must park the heads or something to protect the platters but when I made the noise during an HDD tune bench there was no change in the read speed curve.

 

So any word on what's new about the 7K750b?

 

it looks like 500gb 8mb cache and not 750gb and 16mb cache:

7K750.B 500GB 7200 RPM 8MB cache

HITACHI 0J12281 Travelstar 7K750.B 500GB 7200 RPM 8MB cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 2.5 inch internal notebook hard drive (Bare Drive)

 

No, that's just that store's specific inventory.

7K750 is available in different capacities - up to 750GB. Not sure about the cache though, but cache size is not that important at these capacities.

 

In the first real world benchmarks I've seen Hitachi 7K750 performs ok but not as good as WD..
Western Digital Scorpio Blue 1TB 2.5" Hard Drive Review - Page 8

 

From what I can tell, I don't think the 7K750 is any faster than then 7K500 except for the sequential read/writes speeds for 500mb+ files.

As an OS drive, I don't think there would any noticeable difference between the 7K750 and 7K500 which is pretty much the same as a 500GB Scorpio Black non-AF.

The 7K750 is best suited as secondary drive in systems that have a SSD as main/boot or for those who want a quiet large 7200 RPM drive as their main.

 

HD Tune glitches on some drives. I think a guy named DCMAKER make a thread before about how it glitches on some drives

found it

http://forum.notebookreview.com/win...hdtune-hdtune-pro-inaccurate.html#post6744790

 

I did not read the whole thread, but to fix your HDTune curve - go to settings, benchmark, and increase the block size that you test with (like double it) and try again.

 

I have a Hitachi 7K750 16Mb cache, it's fast and silent. But from time to time when in idle, I can hear a low noise, like a plastic crack. First I thought it's the laptop edges which makes that noise when I stay with my hands on it, but it seem it's from the hdd.
Anyone else also experienced this noise ? Is there a firmware fix or something ? Is this normal ?

P.S.
Before I had WD 750 Scorpio Black 16Mb cache, and I prefer Hitachi noise, instead of WD humming noise in idle.

P.S 2.
While in bios for 3 minutes I couldn't hear that noise. When I booted up in windows the noise started. I think it might me something related to drivers or windows os. Anyone any ideea for a fix ?