Hard Drive Recommendations for Vostro 1700

Yet another hard drive thread but I'm having trouble trying to figure out what is faster, quieter and just plain what I need.

My Vostro 1700 came with a 5400RPM 120GB drive. I want to make it my secondary drive and get something else as my primary.

I don't really need a huge amount of storage on the primary drive (but I'm not opposed to it) and I would like something that's fairly fast and quiet since a couple of the games I play access the drive a lot when you're going in and out of different lots.

I see these 3 drives on NewEgg at 320GB and wonder if they're a good deal and what I'm looking for:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=2010150380+1309733643&name=320GB

Then I go all the way across the other side of the spectrum and see these smaller drive sizes like the 160GBs that have half the price (all are 5400RPM):

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=2010150380+4026+1309721217&name=160GB

I'm just really torn on what to do since I've never upgraded a hard drive before. Suggestions are appreciated!


After searching through the forums, I'm thinking Hitachi or Seagate but if anyone has any other suggestions, I'm all ears.

Also, should I be looking at drives that have SATA 1.5Gb/s or SATA 3.0Gb/s?

 

If you are getting a new primary drive as an upgrade, I would suggest either a faster 160GB+ 7200 RPM or a larger 250GB+ 5400RPM drive. There would be no point in upgrading with anything less than those as it would perform close to your original 120GB drive.

No, this is the least of your concern. Current notebook hard drives do not fully utilize SATA 1.5Gb/s's availalbe bandwidth. Just stick with brand names such as Hitachi, Seagate, WD or Samsung. All 4 brands are quite reputable and reliable under normal usage.

 

The 320gb 5400rpm drives are the fastest harddrives on the market.
They will outperform most 160gb 5400rpm drives.
The only 160gb drive, which would have the same performance of a 320gb 5400rpm drive, is a 2.5" harddrive which packs 160gb of data on one disk.
A 320gb drive has two 160gb disks.
Since they would have the same data density, speed should be identical.
However, I do not think any 160gb 2.5" harddrive utilizes only one disk, so you would be getting a 160gb drive with two platters, both of which have half of the data density as the 320gb drive.
This lower data denstiy = lower bandwidth and read/write speeds.

K-TRON

 

And I take it this drive directly from Dell would be slower than the 320GB at 5400RPM? Just trying to figure out the best route since I have to deal with Dell and their proprietary connectors unless you order the whole drive. Grr...

http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/...=19&sku=341-5327&mfgpid=192258&chassisid=8545

 

If you just want speed, the Hitachi 7K200 is a perfect drive.
It may be a little louder than the 320gb 5400rpm drives, but it will be significantly faster than your current harddrive.
Since your going through Dell, you do not have many options.
The 7k200 is a good deal, for $120 from Dell.

The 320gb 5400rpm drive is identical in speed to the 200gb 7200rpm drive.

K-TRON

 

Well, not exactly slower. The drive from Dell is likely a Hitachi 200GB 7200rpm as Hitachi are the only ones that make 7200 at that capacity at this time, which is one of the fastest drives in the market depending on how you look at it(access times).
The dell proprietary connector is only an adapter that fits ontop of the standard SATA connectors. You could purchase a drive apart from dell and you can upgrade the drive yourself. Which is relatively easy for even novice computer users.

 

Thanks K-TRON and D3X. Whatever they've put in this Vostro is very quiet as well.



Edited: I typed too slow!

Okay, here's a really dumb question for you. I can have a 5400RPM in the secondary bay and a 7200RPM in the primary bay right? I'm not brave enough to set up a RAID config so no worries there.

And just one more question...I currently have 7200RPM 120GB drives on my DV9700T and maybe I'm being picky but I don't find them particularly fast compared to a 250GB 5400 RPM I had in before. Am I missing something?

 

I think you are missing part of his question. He mentioned opionons on the 320GB Hard drive and you are giving info abotu 250gb. Am I missing something? In any event. I have a Dell XPS M1330 I had a 160gb 7200RPM SATA drive. I now have a 320GB 5400 RPM drive and when I ran the benchmark test my new 320GB 5400 RPM is fater than my 160GB 7200 RPM

 

Yep, you are missing something. Drive Density in which K-Tron has mentioned on his posts. The 120GB 7200RPM will have a higher rotation speed, however the drive density will be a single 120GB platter. Compared to 250GB@5400RPM it would rear about the same performance results since the 250 will be a double 125GB platter which would increase transfer speeds, but have lower access times.

Here is some graphs that compare the latest drives(thx to Tomshardware):

A picture is worth a thousand words...

 

Yes, I've read many K-TRON posts on platters but must have misinterpreted because I thought the lower end 120GB 7200RPM drive would be comparable to the 250GB 5400RPM. My mistake. Thanks so much for the picture from TomsHardware. It all makes sense now.


alynch - I read one of your posts about this in another thread and that's why I started considering a 320. It wasn't even on my list until I saw your post so thanks so much!

 

Heh lower end, funny you would mention that. I remember only like 2 years ago the 120GB 7200RPM was the fastest drive you could get. But yes, it's still comparable to today's drives and still much faster than most bottom feeder drives (4200).

 

K-Tron, do you forsee the 7200rpm HDD's coming with a 320GB drive anytime soon? I, like a lot of others it seems, am really torn between the 200GB 7200rpm HDD and the 320GB 5400rpm HDD. I would imagine that if anyone came out with a 320GB 7200rpm HDD, then that would become the fastest on the market, right? Anyway, what do you think? Which would you go with if you had to choose?

 

Well I'm not K-Tron, but I don't quite see the 320GB 7200RPM coming out anytime soon, there has been reports of Fujitsu reaching that feat but I'm not quite sure about reliability or performance levels. Infact, it's the other side of the spectrum that we will see in the coming months. Both Hitachi and Samsung has already announced 500GB 5400 drives being released this summer, there has already been reports that the product has already reached the consumer as external drives and readily available; Buffalo 500GB MiniStation.

 

Actually Thaansa3, I would not bother upgrading.
I have been trying to make a Serial Attached Scsi controller for my notebook, so I can run the Seagate Savvio, 10,000 and 15,000rpm 2.5" server drives.
It looks like I am going to have to buy a pci to sas card, and rework the chip, to run off of a pci express port in my laptop.

Anyways, as per your question, the 320gb 7200rpm drives will be out by June.
However, do not buy the drive when it just comes out. Give it a month or two, then we will be able to see benchmarks and some reviews.
Sometimes new harddrives can have problems, which is why I usually get drives about 4 months after they are released.
I choose the 7k200's for my notebook, becuase the 320gb drives were not available at the time I bought my harddrives.

When it comes down to it, I would take a 320gb 5400rpm drive over the 7k200, it has more capacity, generates less heat and uses less power.

WIth the coming of the 320gb 7200rpm drives, they will change the harddrive market, hopefully pushing transfer speeds from a 53mb/sec average to about 60-65mb/sec, which would become the fastest drive on the market.
However, Samsung is going to release their 500gb 2.5" 5400rpm drive to the public in a month or two, and its performance should be slightly higher than the 320gb drive, since it uses 3 160gb platters.
I would put my money on the new 7200rpm drives for now, since their is not that much further that 2.5" drives can go in data density. We will have to wait for a new kind of harddrive recording technology.

K-TRON

 

Oops! Sorry I'm not too tech savvy, in case it wasn't painfully obvious! Wasn't trying to insult any 120GB 7200 RPM owners. Oh duh. I own 2 of those drives in my DV9700T.



Thanks for the help everyone. I've decided to go with the 320GB hard drive. Now I just have to figure out which brand since NewEgg only has Samsung, Western Digital and Toshiba.

 

Go with the Samsung or the Western Digital, Toshiba does not make as good of harddrives.

I would personally go with the Samsung.

K-TRON

 

Stay away from Samsung. I had one and ocassionaly it would make a clunking noisie or a loud click. the tecs at samsung told me it was normal. i got the drive repalced and what do you know same noise... must be a defect in the line in any event i got a toshiba in one laptop and it runs great I also have a hitachi in my xps m1210 and its is going strong.

 

Thank you for sharing the information with me. I agree 100 percent when you advise people (me in this case) not to get technology when it first hits the market. That's something that I almost never do. I would like to stick with something in the 7200rpm range, so we'll see what happens. Do you believe the 500GB 5400rpm HDD's will outperform the 320GB 7200rpm HDD's (speed, heat, power consumption)?

I thank you for the information.

 

Well, the 500gb 5400rpm drives have the same data density as the 320gb 5400rpm drive.
The 320gb drive utilizes 2 160Gb platters, while the 500Gb utilizes three 160Gb platters.
The only difference is that the 500gb will have 6 harddrive heads rather than the 4 that the 320gb has.
I assume that the 500gb will only be slightly faster than the 320gb 5400rpm drive.
I do believe that the 320gb 7200rpm drives will be much faster than the 500gb 5400rpm drive.
As far as power efficiency goes, I would think that the 7200rpm drive will run cooler and use less power, cause it uses two disks rather than three.
A harddrive with 3 disks is going to generate more heat and more turbulence inside of the drive, which means that more power is going to be needed to maintain the 5400rpm rotation speed.
But we will have to wait a bit for the harddrives to come out, to know for sure.

K-TRON

 

How do you work that one out?

 

See graph above? Read/Write(not in diagrams) transfer speeds are pretty much in the same range. Access times on the other hand are different, up to 2-3 ms difference, but that would imperceptible to the average user.

 

Data density, is what makes the 320gb 5400rpm drive comparable in speed to the 200gb 7200rpm drive.
There is more data per unit area on the 320gb drive, meaning that the heads can read/write to more data in the same amount of time.



I hope this helps,

K-TRON

 

I got a WD 320 because because I was concerned with noise from the Samsung. The WD is not exactly silent, but it does not produce a "loud click." Its noise is closer to a ticking clock in volume

 

A little off but on topic, I did some research on the clicking issue, apparently this issue is rampant and most drives are affected by it more or less.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=168425&page=1

 

Ok, so Richarddd, try putting the power mode to ac power or always on, that should stop the harddrive from clicking.
Also, try doing what is mentioned in the article D3X mentioned.

K-TRON

 

DX3 you are misinformed. The samsung dirves have a distinguished clicking noise. The noise is almost as loud as the old ata hard drives when there were about to fail. I have had several drives from a few manufactures and the samsung clicking noise is not normal for hard drives...... please check your facts. I have had one of the samsung drives a few months ago.... It was the cheapst price and I found out why when my data went soulth... the tech told me the noise was normal ... then one day the click go faster and guess what the drive died on me. yes i got a replacment on the warranty and lucklily I do a weekely backup of my data... but witht that replacemtn its still in the box.... i just shelled out some extra cash and got me a better brand. I am not saying samsung is bad... I am sayting that the 250gb and 320gb laptop drivers they sell are prone to damage and failures. Don't let anyone tell you or try to convince you that a hard driving making clicking noises is normal..

 

Well no, what you are mentioning is the "click of death" and no that would not be normal in any working circumstance. Believe me I know exactly what you are talking about, however, the problem I mention is a seldom click noise where it's caused by the "parking of the head" due to power saving states that are intermittently caused by either the OS or the drives firmware. This is a bug and is a noise that happens when you switch between sleep and battery states to conserve battery.