HITACHI TravelStar 7K VS WD Scorpio Black

Im looking at these two hard drives in terms of heat and noise and not performance! Although im looking for quick boot and read times thats why im going 7K! I have been looking at reviews from new egg as such was posted about the WD drive below

"Cons: Heat! It is much hotter then the old drive, but that is not important if the drive can take the heat for years without failing."

"Cons: Runs a little hot, my previous drive was better in this sense. On the privious the battery could go up to 5.5 hours. Now it's hardly 4. This is the biggest cons."

I have also heard on NBR that the Hitachi is worse than the wd for heat and noise but is faster!

Do you think i should just go for the WD Scorpio Blue WD3200BEVT for lower heat and noise!! I jus dont know! I m looking at replacing my drive straight away when i buy my Sony Vaio FW which comes with a 300Gb 4200 Rpm drive Im not looking to wreck my sony by putting in a noisy hot drive which will be distracting and uncomfortable to work on because of the heat & noise from it!

IF ANYBODY CAN GIVE ME A DECENT, TRUE REVIEW OF THESE TWO PRODUCTS I WOULD BE GRATEFULL??

 

My 2 cents: From reading the reviews I would say that 3200BEVT is very quiet but runs hot.

According to Storagereview 3200BEKT runs cooler and uses less power than 3200BEVT. Link.

Someone loosing 1.5 hours of battery time by using a 3200BEKT is probably mistaking. As far as I know you can't loose 1.5 hours by a harddrive that maybe uses 1.0 watt more max.

Andy reported that 7K320 makes more noise than 3200BEKT.

The problem with a Newegg reviews like the first one you posted is that the person who wrote it does not specify what "hot" means. Was it 40 C.? 50 C? or how much was it.

You can get Hitachi 7K200 200GB for $89 by the way. If that's enough storage for you it's a great deal.

 

Go for the WD3200BEKT (or the WD3200BJKT)....

My WD3200BEKT and WD3200BEVT both idled at 40*C, and the 7K320 at 42-45*C.
The Hitachi 7K320 is a tad noisier but makes up for it in the benchmarks, but I never noticed any vibration problems or whatsoever.
Real-world performance for all the 320GB 7200RPM HDDs is the same, the difference is only noticed in the benchmarks.
And the Hitachi 7K200 at that price, is a steal.

 

I think 3 of the people who had problems with the 7K320 vibrations were Macbook Pro owners. It's nice to have the thinnest and lightest notebook but it comes at a cost. (One of those people wrote a review on Newegg for the 7K320 and 3200BEKT complainging about the noise).

Although there has been one Lenovo owner that mentioned the 7K320 vibration too.

 

Tom's Hardware has some useful charts for idle and maximum power consumption. However, neither of the two 7200rpm HDD under discussion are listed. However, I would expect the WD is be at least as power-hungry (and more power= more heat) as the 5400rpm WD3200BEVT while the Hitachi should be no worse than the previous 7k200. Either is likely to run hotter than the stock 4200rpm HDD (I didn't think anyone made them in 300GB any more).

John

 

If i was to get any drive i would go for the WD Scorpio Black WD2500BEKT which is the 250Gb version, as i won’t need 320Gb storage and its cheaper. I’ve also heard that it is a bad idea to have a to big hard drive with the operating system on it as it can slow the whole thing down. If i needed more storage i would just get 500Gb external storage for cheap!!

So would u think that 40 degrees is a low temp for this sort of hard drive?

 

It's fine as far as I know. But I'll let other people comment since I hardly ever check my drive temperatures.

Buying the 250GB instead of the 320GB has a serious performance impact. Not a good idea imo.
Here's the 250GB BEVT vs. the 320GB in Tom's hardware: http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/...file-writing-performance,679.html?p=1891,1890

 

Does anybody else think this is the case! I’ve also noticed that the bigger the drive, the lower performance you get with random access is concerned! Its a hard decision to what hard drive to get for your comp

 

i have 2 scorpio black 320GB drives in the m1730.
i originally put an order in for 2 momentus 250GB 7200.3 drives, but provantage and fedex screwed things up with my order. as i was expecting both drives on friday so i can set up my raid 0, i only got 1 of them. then i got fed up, and decided to hit bestbuy. i was surprised to find they actually had the wd scorpio black, so i snagged 2 of the 320GB models.

2 days now, they are super quiet, i can't hear a thing unless i put my ear basically on the laptop where the drives are. heat-wise, they get fairly warm, but not scorching hot. if your notebook has seperate bays for each drive, then they will probably run cooler, but both of mine are in a caddy, sandwiched together.

regardless, the performance is pretty good, i have no complaints so far.

 

i think this is true. the larger the platter, or in this case, the more capacity of the platter means the writing head moves less. essentially, the larger capacity drive will read/write quicker than a smaller capacity drive.

2x250 GB raid 0 is slower than 2x500 GB raid 0.
of course, the ultimate in speed would be SSD raid 0 (more than 2 drives).

 

Modern file-systems have file allocation tables or indexes that tell the computer exactly where to look, so the Read/Write heads don't have to search for the file. The advantage of higher data density is that the data is closer together, hence the Read/Write heads do not have to travel as far when going to make their next read/write.
I am not sure about the WDs, but if you compare the 5K320 and the 5K250, the 5K250 has 3 heads (3 sides of 2 platters), hence slightly higher data density than the 320GB HDD.
Check out the Win XP Startup Tests, since it provides an idea of real-world performance.
If you are too much into Access Times, Go for the Hitachi 200GB 7K200, if the 320GB 7200RPM HDDs are too costly for you.
But if you want to stay away from heat and noise, check out the Fujitsu 320GB 5400RPM HDD.

 

It's true that the acces time is impacted a little bit for some high capacity drives, but not in this case. The BEVT was designed to have 160GB on a platter. If you only have 125GB it has a negative impact on tranfer rates.

But no need to second guess, if you look at the different benchmarks of Tomshardware you'll see that the 320GB performs better than the 250GB version. Even in acces times.



If you want maximum speed I think the 3200BEKT is a fine choice for you. If your concerned too much about the little increase in noise go for the 3200BEVT.

I agree the Fujitsu, Samsung HM320JI or Hitachi 5K320. All of those are fast, cool and quiet.

Not exactly as fast as the 3200BEVT but almost as fast.

 

Regarding the time for head movement to find files, I always partition my hard disks. This gives the benefit that the operating system files will always stay close together at the fast end of the hard disk.

John

PS: +1 for the Fujitsu MHZ2320BH. I've now got two. Here's the performance results. It is little cooler than the WD2500BEVS.

 

I'm trying to take all of this in....so if you want a cooler running less noisy drive I should go with the Scorpio?

I was going to get the 160GB WD1600BEKT because I only need about 30GB of space on my laptop but now PhilFlow has mentioned that actually the bigger drives offer better performance (the 320GB version) whereas I always thought the smaller drives offer better performance cause theres less real estate to cover...

PhilFlow I notice those benchmarks are for the 8mb cache versions...do you think its changed at all with the new 16mb cache versions?

Man, I was so content on getting the 64GB SSD OCZ Core before I found out about all of the problems various people are having...now I need to decide on the perfect 7200RPM upgrade

 

The story for the WD1600BEKT is different than the drives mentioned above. Since it has 160GB on one platter it will perform (almost) as good as the WD3200BEKT, which has 2 160GB platters.

I think the WD1600BEKT will deliver on what you want...unless you want a drive that stays extremely cool and quiet, in which case you should look for a 5400rpm drive like the Samsung, Fujitsu or Hitachi.

 

Good to know Phil, thanks for the assistance