Buy 7k320 320GB or 7k500 320 GB (i.e. HTS725032A9A364 or HTS725050A9A364)?

Hi guys,

this is my first post here, but believe me I spent quite a few hours reading through this excellent board. Since my wallet does not allow me to buy that cool HTS725050A9A364 with 500 GB I am looking for a drive that is a bit smaller and cheaper.

Initially I was looking at the WD 3200BEKT but was put off by the relatively high CPU usage. I think, even if this will not slow down a modern system, it will surely cost you a few minutes of battery life and hence should by added to the overall power consumption. Now it is between the two above mentioned drives. Educated suggestions are however still welcome.

Had any one of you had a chance to compare the two 320 GB Travelstar versions or can he/she simply tell to buy the on instead of the other? In Germany they cost about the same. So looking at the price wont help me decide. My guts tell me to buy the 7k500 because it belongs to the more recent series.

Thank you very much in advance!

 

The newer Hitachi will more than likely be more power efficient than the older Hitachi and WD [as that is what seems to concern the manufacturers more than performance] whether you see any performance differences between them would depend on what your doing and looking for, but i doubt you would notice a scrap of difference between the three of them in general usage.
If you do get one, we would like to hear about it, maybe some benchmarks if you could be bothered, no one has posted any performance info on the 320GB version and I have the 7k320, so would be interested

 

Well the Hitachi 7K500 isn't available yet in Europe. WD3200BEKT isn't being sold anymore in Europe as far as I know. So that limits your choices.

Where did you get that idea? The WD3200BEKT uses slightly more power but it's faster than both Hitachi's in most situations.

Taking into account all the limitations of available options in Europe I'd suggest the WD5000BEVT. Relatively fast, low power consumption, quiet and good price.
http://geizhals.at/eu/a365722.html

 

Between the 7K320 and the 7K500, there is not a big difference.
I bought the 7K500 (dual platter 500gb) to replace my (160gb single platter 7K320)
Turns out my 7K320 was faster than the 7K500 in just about everything.
I was quite dissapointed with the 7K500's performance, so I returned it.
If you need the space it is a good drive, but in my case I was looking for more performance, and my single platter drive outperformed it.

About CPU usage, please do not even look at that in hdtune.
The harddrive doesnt take cpu power up, the benchmark simply states system cpu usage at the time of the test.

K-TRON

 

K-TRON,

you were disappointed with the 'snap' the 7K500 had, not the performance overall. It definitely beats the 7K320 overall.

If all you really need is 160GB, then you should have short stroked the 7K500 to 160GB to see if indeed it did beat the 7K320.

The reason you think the 7K500 felt slower is because the signal to noise ratio of the heads gets lower as the platter density increases, thereby reducing the 'snap' the HD can give to the user experience (because the heads need longer to 'settle' into the narrower tracks and more error correction is needed to ensure healthy data is returned).

The actual performance though is higher - once it has found and 'settled' into the smaller/narrower tracks it is seeking on the higher capacity HD.

Seems like a small distinction, but I have noticed this since the 7K200 I was using a couple of years ago. Anything with more capacity seemed slower, even if file copying, installing programs/Windows and things like running PerfectDisk to defrag the file system would almost always go faster on the newer (higher capacity) HD than the 7K200 I was comparing it to.

So, you traded capacity for the 'snap' factor, but you are not 'faster' overall.

The newer models usually have much better overall performance - especially when power consumption, 'real world' use and the huge capacity increase is counted. This is certainly the case for the 7K320 vs. the 7K500.

When capacity and speed are both important - the 7K500 is the best choice currently.

 

Whether the 7K500 wil beat the 7K320 in real life performance is uncertain. Unless someone can point me to real life benchmarks.

But either way I'm expecting the difference will be too small to notice without benchmarking software.

 

Phil, I think there is no doubt that copying a large (>25GB) mixed folder of large and small files on the 7K500 is faster than on the 7K320? Even a single platter version of the 7K320?

I distinctly remember that the 7K320 was out of consideration for me (against the 7K200) because it was much slower the the competition's drives at that time.

I too would like to see a real world test (not a benchmark) that copied a large amount of various sized and type of data between the 'older' best and the current contender(s) to the throne.

 

Large files no doubt.

I do have doubts about small files because the IOPS scores of the 7K500 were not that impressive.

Maybe Chaz's review will answer these questions.

 

Thanks very much to all of you.

Of course Phil is right. The Hitachi HDs I was talking about are not available here at all. I should have checked that before hand.

The WD 3200BEKT however seems to become available next week or so. At least there is one store which lists them as 1 day over due. So, going entirely off topic in my own thread, I see my current options as follows

WD Scorpio Black 3200BEKT 65.-€
WD Scorpio Blue 5000BEVT 75.-€
SG ST9 500420AS 100.-€
SG ST9 250410AS 50.-€ Per here this is the largest single platter Momentus 7400.4.


Beside the data I found in the forum there are the following from C't magazine:

WD Scorpio Black 3200BEKT
Const. read(min/av/max): 39.6/61.1/80.1
Const write(min/av/max): 39.6/60.7/78.4
Random acc.: 11.2
IOMix 140
Sone (idle/seek): 0.7/0.8 (This is relatively loud)

WD Scorpio Blue 5000BEVT
Const. read(min/av/max): 38.8/54.8/69.5
Const write(min/av/max): 38.8/54.8/69.5
Random acc.: 11.7
IOMIX: 130
Sone (idle/seek): 0.5/0.5

SG ST9500420AS
-

SG ST9250410AS
Const. read(min/av/max): 49.9/77.6/98.8
Const write(min/av/max): 49.3/76.8/98.1
Random acc.: 15.4
IOMIX: 88
Sone(idle/seek): 0.4/0.6

What I am looking for:

1. Near silence in idle mode: I cannot have a drive that you hear spinning
2. Very subtle vibes in idle
3. Moderate seek noise and vibes: It is ok for a disk to share some its working experience with the user.
4. Fast Application startup and Firefox disk cache
5. Storage size: The size is primarily a means to have a fast system partition. Everything from 250GB would if it meets the higher ranked criteria.
6. Large copy jobs (small or large files) will be rather rare and any occurring will involve MB or GB sized files.

So it looks like it will be the Scorpio Blue out of noise vibration and speed considerations. Yet ... I would really like something as fast as the Black ;-) and some people here describe it as silent ...

 

The synthetic performance benchmarks of C'T don't mean much. The IOmix is a bit more useful.

I've owned a Black and it gave vibrations. If you care about noise WD5000BEVT is the better option imo.

But you could also wait a couple of days or weeks. It seems like Hitachi 7K500 may be arriving soon.

What notebook do you have?

 

I would wait for a 7K500 or the western digital drives... If i were u , i wouldn't trust seagate... especially these new momentus ones... they fail like flies if ur unlucky....nver buy seagate..

 

Tiller, I dont know what snap you are talking about.
If you mean snappyness, than yes my 7K320 was snappier.
Large Rhinoceros files, 100mb and larger opened substantially faster on the 7K320 I had.

As with anything, the 7K500 I got was new off the presses, so the firmware hadnt quite matured.
Dispite the arguing, I do not think the speed difference is going to be that much noticeable in every day use.

K-TRON

 

Lenovo X200 with an 1.8" 64 GB Samsung SSD. Yet I need more space and cannot afford a 240 GB SSD. So it will be a downgrade anyway.

Already owned a 7400.4 for about 2 hours. Then I saw that it was a 'recertified' disk and brought it back.

 

Small and light notebook. The Black may cause noise and vibration.

 

Reinvent the wheel much
Your posts on every hard drive topic are getting very tiring, k-tron has owned both...you haven't, you can rant on in an excited manner touting you did this and you did that, but at the end of the day I believe him more than you because A. he's owned both and B. he doesn't rant on about every little experiment being some revolutionary break through that only he was able to come up with.....seriously mate, you come across like a kid in love with linux for the first time, or someone that has just found out you can replace a hard drive.
Sorry if that's not the way it is, but you really need to stop thinking your the only one who knows anything, because you aren't, it's not a competition where whoever posts the longest and most frequent responses wins.
Telling the guy what he felt is ludicrous, and besides that the OP was asking about the 320GB version which no one has owned and posted any findings on yet

 

Wow!

I responded to clarify a distinction, that K-TRON still doesn't understand, nor do you I see - I hope that the OP does though, it was for his/her benefit that I posted.

I did own both, not at the same time though.

Believe anyone you want, but just what did you contribute here? Except try to show that I'm not worth listening to?

Cheers!

 

I had 2 of thos Seagate Momentus go out on me in little over a year. I put my (Nov 2009 build date) 7K500 benchamrks against remaining Seagate in some other forum...the new 500GB Hitachi smoked the Seagate by 10% across the board, some tests 25% to over twice a fast at ceratin things.

Here's identical laptops, 7K320 less than year old in wife's 8510p, T9300, 4GB, Win 7 x64, son's laptop all the same except put new 7K500 in three weeks ago.

Can't find the HDTune 3.5 (I think) trial verison I had used, and the new 4.0 is buggy GUI so went with HDTune 2.55, as all I have.

So, wife's laptop was low on battery so it's plugged in, has the 7K320; son's laptop 3/4 charged so ran on battery for grins has the new 7K500:

HDTune 2.55 Benchmark tests (I'll try file copy next) 7K320 - 7K500 displayed below:

Transfer Rate MB/sec:
MIN: 29.8 - 43.1
MAX: 79.8 - 108.5
AVG: 62.8 - 82.93

Access Time ms: 16.6 - 17.1
Burst Rate MB/sec: 89.9 - 131.0

Hand Time 750MB across numerous directories

24 sec - 24 sec (tie)


Different set of files, Hand Time 1.2 GB across numerous directories:

110 sec - 48 seconds

Then lastly huge data set 6.98GB of files folders
5 min 34 sec - 4 min 21 sec


Win7 Restart to Fingerprint Auth Gina:
1:12 (72 sec) - 57 seconds

So hope this helps, shouldn't matter a whole bunch, but my son's 7K500 was running on battery, wife's was plugged in charging running 7K320. All file copy were off same source server, plugged into same GB swtich. Exact file structure copied via GUI (not cmd line or robocopy)

Overall, I'm thinking the new 7K500 is pretty much the winner here. Feels like it when 'driving' as well, noticably quicker on the newer 7K500. This is a pretty close comparison, as won't find too many machines as identical in specs (all HP 8510p, identical BIOS, drivers, etc).

As one poster commented, seems like Hitachi making the M-B of hard drives. I'll never touch another seagate, and the Hitachi is quieter and faster (in some respects) than WD, while very energy efficient.

P.S. I was curous so went a looked, wife's 7K320 was manufactured June 2009.

 

msft907,

Thanks very much for doing these tests (especially the file copy tests).

I had to +1 your rep for this.

So, almost 28% improvement for the 7K500 with an over 56% increase in capacity... not too bad.

Cheers!

 

this might be of interest as well...

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=448792

 

clearly , 7K500 owns 7K320... looks like wrong move on ur part K-Tron....

 

I don't think anybody is going to argue that a denser drive will have better large file copying speeds, the question is, how often do you copy a 6GB or 43GB folder 10 times a day to make it relevant.

Also comparing boot times of a 3 week old install against a presumably june 2009 install is comparing apples with apples?

My own 7k320 will copy a 7GB folder of mp3's with sub folder's etc in 56 seconds less than msft's one, but thats probably an XP v W7 thing.

I will buy one when I can find one, but I'm going to be annoyed if its another 7200.4

 

It's not just better file copying speeds for large files, the benefits are there for small files too.

I copy over 100GB every day or two, so a 30 to 40% difference is significant.

I also do compare apples to apples. If you see my thread on how I set up a 'recovery' partition, then you would know that what I setup on my VAIO last year is what I'm running on today.

It's not just an XP vs. Win 7 thing - there are driver interactions and the basic install of each persons system that will make one faster than another. Also, don't forget what a better CPU/GPU will do for an test as well as the amount and quality of the RAM too.

As to whether it's 'another 7200.4', all I know is in my system (VAIO) the Hitachi beats (+40%) the Scorpio Blue which easily beat the Seagate. Hope your experience is the same.

Cheers!

 

Well, apparently don't know a whole lot about OSs...date of install means zilch. Win7 is self optimizing so as runs more boot times tend to decrease.

Since I maintain all our systems at home, I know what's loaded, what updates applied, and what's in startup groups. I won't bore you with tech details, do some reseach on Technet and MSDN you'll learn a lot.

Depends on where you're copying from, and waht OSs involved. I simply gave apples to apples comparo. If my home server was running 2008 would have been far faster, but that gets into TCP/Ip stack and SMB 2 vs SMB 2.1 (search on them)

 

The fact you think windows 7 doesn't degrade over time [after its intitial settling increase] is laughable, maybe you just hang around your suggested MS feelgood sites too much to remain objective lol.

Your testing method is nothing like apples to apples, one on battery, one on an old OS install, separate notebooks of the same spec are still variables.

Good day and enjoy your new hard drive, I will see for myself ultimately.

 

In his tests the 7K500 was better, but he is comparing dual platter to dual platter. My single platter 7K320 loaded programs faster than my 7K500 did.
I am pretty sure I made the right move returning it.

K-TRON