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

ww.frys.com still has it at 89.00, I would not wait guys get it today. Suggested list price is 159.00.

 

It's arleady reached its low IMO and on the way up until 640GB becomes the norm. You can use Bling to get 8% back I think. You lost the very low price and free shipping by waiting. Or try Fry's if its still on sale there.

 

The WD6400BEVT is only $89.99, though. I would rather have the better RPM the Hitachi gives than the extra space, though.

 

I don't see the 7K500 Hitachi listed on Frys site any longer.

 

Here is the link:
http://www.frys.com/product/5954604?site=sr:SEARCH:MAIN_RSLT_PG

 

Oops I did not look close enough, that is the 5400 speed not the 7200, my mistake. perhaps they have sold out???

 

yeah, I can't find it either at Fry's - must be sold out.

dbmcelroy, next time use your edit button instead of posting twice.

 

yeah and WD5000BEVT is faster than the 640GB.

 

The Newegg special was a heck of a deal. I don't need the drive now since I don't really store anything on my laptop, so I'm perfectly content with waiting however long it takes for the price to come back down and stay at that level in the future. However, that deal was obviously a "you snooze, you lose" offer. It wasn't listed as a Black Friday special in Newegg's e-newsletter or on their site.

 

Yeah, I can't believe I fluked out (for once) and actually got that deal.

This was obviously a notebookreview.com 'special'!

(Expecting it Dec 3...)

 

A lot of the stores use an algorithim. If there is high demand, they reset the price. If you look at Amazon you can tell the price changing sometimes on certain items based on how many times you go back and look at the same product. Clear the IE cache.

This was by far the deal of the year in terms of HDD. Brand new gen 500 gigger spinning at 7200RPM. It's like they were offering a Porsche at Mustang prices.

 

I bought one too, I'm mean for $80 how can you go wrong? I needed a second drive for the UltraBay anyway. Originally I bought the 1TB from Amazon for a $150, but the ship date got pushed back to Feb so I canceled. Then I bought the 640GB WD on eBay for $70, but the flipping seller decided it wasn't available. I can just use the Seagate in there for now. I wish you could get the WD 1TB somewhere in a reasonable amount of time and at a reasonable price.

 

Has anyone ran into a review of these drives yet?

BaldwinHillsTrojan, you made me feel real good about my purchase - I've always wanted a 'steal' of a Porsche!

 

It's looking like I'll get it tomorrow if UPS delivers on Friday.

 

I imagine the WD 640gb has decent speeds thanks to platter density, but the Hitachi... no word on whether its quiet, performs well, or less vibration. All thats really confirmed is that it nips more power from battery.

 

Confirmed? Links please? TIA

 

Mine comes in on Tuesday; I can give feedback on some of these. The power consumption specs look pretty darned good, so I'm not sure that your comment on power consumption is correct.

 

Dr-J,

I too lean towards that conclusion - mine will be here (next) Thursday, ugh!

 

The Hitachi TravelStar 500GB 7,200rpm notebook HDD deal is back on again for $79.99 (with Free Shipping) at Newegg:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145275

Good luck to anyone still wanting to buy it.

Full credit goes to Forte since he/she found out about the "resurrection" of this deal earlier than I do.

 

Actually the WD6400BEVT is quite a mediocre performer. It has been benchmarked against the WD5000BEVT by Tomshardware and looses by quite a margin.

 

you folks should get down on it.

 

For $80 the review doesnt matter. Should be in line with a smilar spec Seagate or WD at least. But the upside is its probably lower power draw.

 

I can do a comparison between Seagate 7200.4 500GB and Hitachi 7K500 500GB as I own both at the moment:

HDTune values: Max - Avg - Min - Acess Time - Burst Transfer
Seagate: 100MB/s - 78MB/s - 46MB/s - 16.6msec - 72MB/sec
Hitachi: 110MB/s - 85MB/s - 50MB/s - 21.0msec - 135MB/sec

Subjective comparisons:

- Noise:
Hitachi is much more silent. No humming noise and no head clicking which are both present in Seagate. I have used several notebook HDD's in the past few years and Hitachi 7K500 is the most silent of all. I feel like I have an SSD.

- Vibration:
Hitachi has higher vibration than Seagate. If you run both drives bare (i.e. connected via USB cable) you will feel it clearly. However if you insert them to the drive bay with cushions around, you won't feel anything.

- Power:
Don't care as I use my laptop on AC for most of the time.


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The Hitachi whomps it it except for access time, where the Seagate beats it by about 4 milliseconds. Is that noticeably slower?

 

Nope, in fact Hitachi made my computer more snappy. Perhaps because of the increase in the burst rate? Not sure.


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I think Seagate blows.

 

ramgen, Thanks for the quick comparo!

Quick question: were both drives tested as system drives or secondary drives?

 

Could you do a real world test?

For example: duplicate a 5GB folder on the same drive and time it by hand.

I'm expecting the Hitachi to be close to twice as fast in real world performance.

 

Both were system drives but all the HDD-activity bound apps (i.e. Superfetch, updates etc) were disabled.

Phil,

I will do it and post the results when I have time.


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Don't get too obsessed with benchmarks and things people. The Hitachi is a newer quicker drive, and it is on sale for an incredibly good price, buy it!

 

Does anyone knows what kind of performance you get with a pair of those in a raid 0 configuration?

 

Any news on the thermal performance of this drive versus other 7200RPM drives?

 

Ayle,

2x 7K500 RAID0 would be the highest performing notebook mechanical drive setup now available 3x should be even more impressive.

Did you see this earlier?

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=5556738&postcount=140

(Now, imagine two of them. )

This easily beats not only my Scorpio Blue, which is no slouch, but also the technically superior (spec-wise) Seagate 7200.4.

Forge; I can't find the post right now, but I'm sure I've read that it was quieter and cooler than a 7200.3 drive.

Comparing it to the (newer) 7200.4's is out of the question for me (I bought the Scorpio Blue because it was faster than the Seagates) so even if they're cooler - so what!

 

I'm interested in how it stacked up against a WD3200BEKT (320GB @ 7200RPM). Since it looks like the shutdown threshold for the Hitachi is 55C, I'm a bit worried. In 67F-ish weather the WD drive can get around 47C or 48C, and that's very close to 55C. Plus when it turns to summer...

 

Forge, here is my thoughts on the higher spec's for temperatures on the WD's.

At first, I thought it was a 'free' bonus and indicated a better drive - when it outperformed the 7200.4's I returned, I tended to believe that.

However, now you have me thinking... maybe these have to be spec'd higher because WD doesn't know how to do it better? Of course the 5 degree cooler temperature (the 0 in the 0-60 spec) may be a byproduct of the fact that they can't make it run continuously and reliably below a 55 celsius cutoff, so, they overbuild it and can brag about a higher spec?

However, what if this higher spec is needed - because of an inefficient design?

This would seem to be born out with the higher Wattage used in idle power requirements compared to other drives - the WD's are higher and therefore should be heating up more.

See:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/notebook-hard-drive,2006-16.html

Hitachi's are (and have always been) near the top performer's heat and power-wise, so the 55 celsius spec might be all it needs - because it is able to keep itself cool, by being miserly with the power it uses.

Anyway, just a theory that popped into my head, but I think I may be onto something.

The only way to know is to try it in your system.

Hope this helped a little and hope I didn't confuse you trying to explain it?

It makes sense to me.

 

Made sense to me. And, of course, lower voltages play a huge role in temperatures. But I did notice the low voltages were at idle, not load. Or am I right in thinking that, once a game or level or whatever loads, it goes idle?

Well, I hope I'm not getting crashes on my nightly gaming runs.

 

Where'd you see the information about that 55C threshold?

 

5-55 Celsius is somewhat of a standard for notebook HD's except for WD's 0-60 Celsius specs.

See:
http://www.hitachigst.com/tech/techlib.nsf/techdocs/3FDCAB792901CF4B862575D8005AB39B/$file/TS7K500_DS.pdf

 

I hope you're not too, but for example in those graphs, the BEKT Black hits 3.26 W and the 7200.3 is just over 3 W (3.03 W).

So maybe my theory is still holding up and your gaming runs will also be running cool too.

 

Well, I should get it on Monday. All that needs doing is formatting and installing. Fingers: crossed.

Page 25.

However, it also says "The system is responsible for providing sufficient air movement to maintain surface temperatures below
60°C at the center of top cover and below 63°C at the center of the drive circuit board assembly."

Dunno what that means.

 

Forge,

I would take that to mean that it is effectively the same as the WD with regards to maximum temperatures - the only difference is that the Hitachi will shut itself down if the temps go over 55 Celsius (ie. at 56 degrees) but the drive is safe until it hits 60 (and the circuit board doing the work gets another 3 degrees of safety margin).

This is good news in the sense that at least you won't kill the drive - even if it does shut itself down on you.

BTW, you do use a notebook cooler, right?

 

Oscillates between 39C and 44C depending on the usage. I could not make it exceed 44C (even after 30GB+ file write).

BTW, these are the temperatures in the drive bay and I am not using any notebook coolers.


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Ramgen, did you get around to measure the folder duplicating speed?

Just in case you don't know what I meant, duplicating a 5GB folder is copying and pasting it onto the same drive. This way read speed, write speed and acces times are all measured in a real life scenario. This is where Seagate drives usually fail.

 

I have one, but I haven't used it since winter came around.

And I want to make my notebook self-sufficient in that I don't need additional cooling to game on it. Whenever I do a "test" for stability, I leave the cooler off.

 

I don't think that is quite meaningful. 5GB single file vs. 5 GB of 10.000 files will be different. Also I don't have my Seagate as a system drive so I can't compare it. Seagate is in an external HDD box right now.


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Of course it only makes sense when it's the same 5GB folder.

And it needs to be as system drive.

 

ramgen,

thanks for the real temperature info. BTW, what was your ambient temperatures during that?

Even if you only did the Copy 5GB Folder test on the Hitachi itself, and gave the total # of files and the smallest, largest and average sizes, this would be meaningful (to me). Thanks in advance if you do decide to do that.

Forge,

I see the notebook cooler not as winter/summer - but more along the lines of extending the life of the notebook as long as possible. Is it still true that on specific components, a 5 degree drop in temperature equals a year (or more?) of extended usage?

I agree that the best would be a totally self-sufficient unit, but then that comes down to the actual design and size of the notebook in question.

This is one reason actually, why I stay away from anything 'Mac' - the heat produced is making me question the tradeoffs between form vs. function.

(pls, no Mac vs. PC arguments - this is my personal opinion for the way I would actually use them)

Phil, thanks for reminding ramgen about the 5GB test! I had forgotten who we were waiting for...

 

I got a 200MB [205.067KB] file, copied it into a folder 20 times and did the folder duplication test and it took 97 seconds to duplicate the entire folder. You may repeat this scenario in your drive.

tilleroftheearth,
The ambient temperature was 25-26C.


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ramgen, your Hitachi is amazing!

No matter if you had 21, 200MB files or 20, 200 MB files (doesn't really matter)...

My Scorpio Blue copies a folder of 20, 200MB (205,556KB) files in just over 260 seconds.

Hitachi

Thanks for the ambient temps too - that also makes me think the Hitachi is running cooler than the Scorpio Black BEKT for example. Cheers!

 

i put a new 7K500 in a HP laptop and its peak hits 48C with idle temp at 43C, while previous seagate 320G 5400rpm runs at 42C idle at this HP. 7K320 runs only 35C idle in vostro 1400, but HP does have some hard drive heat dissipation issue. i have seen a few HP laptops HD temps runs higher than Dell. anyway 7K500 seems run a bit warm.