Best 320gb hard drive???

According to the benchmarks sofar WD Black Scorpio seems the best pick.

 

Hmm.. Thanks. i'll look out for that.

 

You can find many benchmarks between the WD 3200BEKT and Seagate 7200.3 here: http://techreport.com/articles.x/15079/4

 

Also, in the 5400rpm class, don't overlook the Fujitsu MHZ2320BH. Performance is good while heat and noise are OK. In my part of the world (UK) it is also the least expensive of the 320GB HDDs.

John

 

How do you get the best out of your drive in HD Tune..??
I have got the WD3200BEVT ($62, new OEM, EBay Auction )....

 

About 7200 rpm 320 GB drives, has Samsungs or Westerns ones something like BDE which Hitachi has?

 

If in vista let SuperFetch have 10 minutes to do its housekeeping, then turn off the antivirus and make sure you minimise the number of background processes which may be accessing the HDD (eg indexing, defragger). You might be able to kill these in Task Manager or change their settings to reduce disk activity. After all, if you want the optimum disk performance during normal usage then you need to control the other processes competing for HDD time.

John

 

Hitachi has BDE, Dunno about WD (the WD Passports offer data encryption with their WD Sync software for Windows only), I think Seagate does offer FDE..
Samsung - no idea..?! You should check out their documentations....

Or if I just start vista in diagnostic mode..?? Will it limit the performance of HD Tune and the HDD in any way....??

 

Very good tips, in addition I would say just terminate as many processes as possible by pressing ctrl-alt-del and browsing through the list of running processes. The ones that are eating CPU and memory are most interesting.

My score improved a lot by terminating many of the scvhost.exe processes, disable WLAN, Hcontrol.exe and soundman.exe. All downward spikes disappeared.

 

Samsung mention

but don't explain what that means.

John

 

Any idea, what does this mean....?!

 

That means that the ATA controller is currently running at ATA 6 speeds or 100mb/sec. Your motherboard can accept up to ATA-7 or speeds of 133mb/sec. Hdtune reads both sata and ata hubs, so the ata hub being picked up is the optical drive's hub. Since you are running a SATA drive, you do not need to worry about it

K-TRON

 

Thanks to everyone who posted some great information. I ordered the Black Scorpio from Newegg and it should be here by the weekend.

 

Curious if anyone knows a cheaper place to find the scorpio black HD. Ive only been able to find 2 sites(newegg and wiredzone.com) that offer them. im hopping there is a cheaper solution.

 

zipzoomfly had it a few days ago, and they usually have better prices than newegg.
Provantage has it for a good price:
http://www.provantage.com/western-digital-wd3200bekt~7WND900N.htm

K-TRON

 

I have the Hitachi 7k320, got mine last week. I like Hitachi better than WD, but I hear they perform very similarly.

 

Can you please run pcmark05 or vantage on the 7k320, so we can get benchies to compare the drives. I personally dislike Western digital, and I havent seen any benchies of the 7k320 yet, I hope it is better than seagate and wd.

K-TRON

 

No. Those are peecee programs. I have a Mac. But I do have Xbench numbers...

7k320 Xbench in Macbook

Results 44.50
System Info
Xbench Version 1.3
System Version 10.5.4 (9E17)
Physical RAM 4096 MB
Model MacBook4,1
Drive Type Hitachi HTS723232L9A360

Disk Test 44.50

Sequential 82.60
Uncached Write 105.61 64.86 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 104.92 59.29 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 47.73 14.01 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 118.03 59.41 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Random 30.45
Uncached Write 9.90 1.05 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 96.71 30.96 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 82.58 0.59 MBUncached Read 126.34 23.44 M



Unfortunately, I have some other programs running at the same time, so I think these numbers are low. I need to kill EVERY running application and benchmark it again properly. Maybe later...

 

does hdtune or hdtach work on a mac, those are pretty helpful, cause they show charts.

Thanks for the info though, its nice to have a 7k320 owner here.

K-TRON

 

Why no one else using one? There are several online retailers that have them in-stock and shipping today (no, not newegg). Price around $195, so slightly more than WD 320 black.

 

I just installed my Scorpio 320 in my 1520. It runs just fine. So far, though, about every few seconds (when the HD is idle) it sounds like the HD speeds up then slows down almost like its in waves. I just put tons of data on it, though, so I'm gonna defrag and restart then put up a HDTune comparison

 

@bossier: You're talking about the Scorpio Black (7200RPM) right?

 

No, the blue (5400).

 

I just installed my Black Scorpio. I ran HDTune on my 200gig 7200 Hitachi just before swapping so as soon as I run HDTune on ths one I will post the results.