Hitachi 7K500 Travelstar 500GB 7200rpm 2.5" drive 9.5mm height

Is everyone discussing this drive?



Original thread: http://www.benyouhui.com/viewthread.php?tid=1007177&page=1

The current price is about 170 USD in China.

The performance is obviously greater than 7200.4. I have returned my 7200.4 for refund immediately once I saw this s/s.

 

Wow, you already have it man?

 

Well if hasn't come out by 2nd week of dec. I'm just getting the wd 640gb. 3 of them for my np9262 (because I can).

 

It looks impressive the benchies there.

 

Will this hdd be faster than the current ones, i.e. seagate and wd?

 

yes........

 

Nice, though I think the price will also be at a premium

 

Anyone using one yet? I only see one retailer (through google shopping) selling it. I wish it had come out in September when I needed the hdd. I bet performance is good though since the 7K320 was relatively solid in the benchmarks. Also nice to have an alternative to the Seagate 7200.4 for 500gb. Not been a fan of the Momentus line.

Anyone know when WD plans on releasing their equivalent line of 250gb platter 7200rpm drives?

 

It's available on Taobao (Chinese eBay) for 170 USD at the moment. No legit retail yet.

It destroys the 7200.4. I guess this should perform better than WD as well.

PS: Sorry I don't trust Seagate any more, after I received my 3rd Seagate drive with loads of sectors respond time > 150ms. (Really colourful results from MHDD )

 

I read somewhere that December is the earliest we'll likely see it at retailers.

I wonder if Hitachi is having some shipping issues in general -- I've been looking for a 7K320 (320GB) and they seem to be out of stock everywhere.

 

It might score a bit better in the benches, which I would hardly defined as destroys. In real world usage they're probably exactly the same.

I've had four Seagates in a row. All have been cool and quiet with good performance. I like that Seagate offers a free download of DiscWizard on their web site. It's limited version a TrueImage, a very good imaging software. I use it myself in place of the Rescue and Recovery offered on ThinkPads, which can be bloated.

P.S. - Watch the language. We don't take kindly to circumventing the language filter around here.

 

????

Seagate, Hitachi, Western Digital, Fujitsu, Toshiba and Samsung all offer a 3 yr warranty on there 2.5" SATA drives

The only 2.5" Sata drive which cane be bought now with a 5yr warranty is the Velociraptor - which will not work in a laptop.

Seagate used to offer a 5yr warranty, but that is a thing of the past now.

K-TRON

 

Oh crap, I forgot that I'm talking about 2.5" HDs. My bad. Deleted.

 

Sorry about the language. Won't use those words again. (Though they're not enough to describe how I dislike seagate... )

I have read about a report of statistics and Seagate has the highest failure rate, which fits my own experience well.

 

So... what's the CPU usage?

 

I read a review of a bunch of 500GB drives on techreport and the 7200.4 was a pretty poor performer for its class, beaten in many benchmarking tests by 5400rpm drives. Made me not want to buy one

 

Was it the firmware problem?

 

I expect the real world performance of the 7K500 to be better than 7200.4.

7200.4's real world performance is similar to WD5000BEVT 5400rpm.

 

Not sure... but the WD Scorpio Blue (5K500) was the hands down winner in the group. The June report is here: http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/17010

 

The Hitachi is a year younger than the Seagate. It should score better in the benchmarks, but I doubt it makes much of a noticeable difference unless you're copy and pasting files all day. That's been my experience anyway.

 

WD offers a five-year-warranty on the Scorpio Blacks...

 

ZaZ,

I've always loved Hitachi's, beginning with the 7K60 all the way to the 7K200.

When I tried the 7200.4 Seagate to replace the 7K200 - I ended up returning 4 of the Seagates - that's how bad they were.

This was noticeable just installing Vista on them, let alone actually using them to do any work with.

The Scorpio Blue 500GB drive showed just how bad the Seagates were. And, it felt almost as snappy as the 7K200 it replaced even at 5400 RPM's.

I too am looking forward to these new Travelstars and hope they perform better than the 7K320's did.

 

I didn't even notice that ZaZ gave me a warning because I used a bad word on 7200.4 (which violated the forum rules I guess, but not warned elsewhere)

Looks like you are even more unlucky than me~ I only returned two Seagate drives in a row, both 2.5" 7200rpm drives. Still haven't received refund from OcUK. I will be more careful about buying HDD in the future.

 

A minor data point: I've never had a hitachi/ibm drive fail prematurely (in less than the 3 or 5 year warranty term) while I have claimed warranty replacement for about 1/2 of the WD and Seagate drives I've owned.

The oldest drives I have in service at home are all IBM/Hitachi, 4 of them 5+ years old in a pair of Raid1 mirror sets. The drives are running/reporting SMART and the server they are connected to is set to send email in case of drive errors, even recoverable errors. No emails.

On the other paw, drives are cheap enough that many of us can afford to go with nothing other than Raid1 mirror sets. The three desktops I run at home all have a 500 Gb Raid1 (2x 500Gb) set as %systemdrive% and my primary personal desktop has an additional 1 Gb Raid1 (2x 1Tb) as D:.

 

Unless you really, really need the extra capacity (at the expense of performance) - I would recommend the Scorpio Blue 500 GB's over the 640 GB ones.

See:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/640gb-mobile-hdd,2451.html

 

My 7200.4 has been excellent. That's what I can tell you.

 

That's pretty surprising. I did expect the 640GB to outperform the 500GB.

Even though Tom only uses synthetic benchmarks it really looks like the 500GB will be faster in real life.

That makes the WD5000BEVT still the best hard drive available at this moment.

 

My first 7200RPM drive was the 7k40, which I proudly put into my piece o' junk Compaq 2199.

 

Can anyone please post a link to the Taobao site where you can buy this drive?

 

Please? 10char

 

Bump! 10char.

 

http://item.taobao.com/auction/item_detail-0db2-6f4edb5e1909670445f9a93397ee9ee0.htm?cm_cat=0

But be warned there are many scammers on Taobao, just like eBay.

 

Oh ok.. Well, they do have a feedback system there as well right?

 

Yes they do. But it's easy to farm reputation as in eBay.

 

Well, yeah you're right. I've contacted Hitachi about this, and they told me that they're already selling this drive though I'm in awe why it's still very hard to find in most online resellers.

 

if it's OEM it usually goes first to system builders, i.e. Dell , HP, Apple etc...

when I got hp hdx 16t I was hoping it was a hitachi no dice it was the seagate 500gb 7200rpm....boo...that think is always clicking compared to my NP9262 that has more use.

 

Fry's has the retail box available for $99.99

http://www.frys.com/product/5966014?site=sr:SEARCH:MAIN_RSLT_PG

 

ORDERED! shipping overnight, can't wait, actually I was able to, forever. . .

 

No way......arghhh that just a great deal too

 

its rating seems not nice:
http://www.rateitall.com/i-27925-frys.aspx

 

Frys is a massive retailer. They are fine.

 

Nice find, I'm just wondering why is it so cheap in Fry's considering it's even the retail version?

 

For the guy worried about Frys.com:



recieved in less than 24 hrs for $114.95 shipped. Backing up and installing as we speak in my mpb 17"!

 

Fry's here in Vegas has them, listed as $99.99 online and $114.99 in stores, but if you do a store pickup order online (you provide a credit card to hold it in-store for pickup; the credit card is not charged) you can get it for $99.99 out the door, with tax where applicable.

Just called and checked stock, the guy said they 14 on the shelf and just got 55 more on a pallet off a shipment truck that just came in earlier today so... I wish I had the money to get one but it'll just have to wait.

As for the pricing: Fry's is typically the lowest cost retailer you'll find on such items. Whereas Newegg sells the WD 320GB Scorpio laptop drive for $119.95 regularly, it's $99.95 at Fry's every day and sometimes drops to $69.95 if you're paying attention. When you buy from Fry's online, 99.999% of the time you'll get a brand new item never before opened/used - if you buy in stores, there's a chance you could get a refurb or something that's pre-owned. Just how things work out...

circa86: I do hope you'll do a nice round of benchmarks with HDTach, HDTune, and CrystalDiskMark as well, preferably testing the drive before you install your OS on it (attached as a secondary drive if possible). Either way you can do it and provide the results, I'm sure I'm not the only person that would greatly appreciate seeing just what this monster drive can manage.

Thanks...

(I see you're using an MBP so, I guess Xbench is the primary one you can/will use under OSX, let's hope you can manage to get some benches done under Windows too)

 

So tempted on picking up two when I get back home tomorrow from the nearest Fry's where I live. Buy two Raid-0 them and 640gb the wd as back up. I dont think I can return the other two 640gb wd drives.

 

Won't be able to test the had as secondary storage as it is replacing my internal Seagate 7200.2 160GB that shipped with the MBP. But I will likely be able to get some benchmarks under OS X and Windowa when I get around to installing it again under bootcamp.

 

How's the noise and vibration?

 

What is noise and vibration? If my ear is sandwiched up against where the HDD sits I am able to hear something, but in any normal situation it is dead quiet. I don't notice any vibration at all.

Noticeable difference in speed between the 7k500 and the Seagate HDD it replaced. All the major Apps I use launch significantly faster, enough for me to notice quite a drastic difference. Photoshop, Maya, Final Cut Studio, Logic, etc. Good stuff.

Should have proper benchmarks up soon. Need to let the HDD finish indexing.

 

Benchmark that really matters to me:



Average Read/Write speed examples in reference to video frames.

Xbench:


Note: these are not done in much of a controlled setting. Completed after restoring from a full backup, letting the disk finishing indexing in OS X, then running the benchmarks.

It's quick, I love it, best $100 I have spend on my laptop.

 

And not much else really matters. If it can do that 90MB/s even as an average that's a massive win in my book. My system partition is never more than 20% of a drive's capacity up to around 50GB or so; apparently that Hitachi can easily maintain it's high sustained reads/writes in that beginning chunk so, yeah, I need to get one.

Would love to have some really monster speed SSD at this point, but they're still so expensive. The recently released Kingston 40GB "Boot" drive (it's a stripped down Intel G2 drive, actually) gives monster read performance but is practically capped at ~40MB/s for write speeds so it's a bit crippled there. Supposedly Kingston is working with Intel on getting a firmware with TRIM support out fast for it but, so far they haven't.

The drive was just released like 2 weeks ago so, it'll happen as time goes by. Can find that 40GB drive for under $100 after a MIR from Kingston. It's still something to consider if you really want fast reads. Here's a decent review if anyone is interested:

http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1111/1/

230MB/s sustained reads... geez.