Largest 7200RPM single-platter HD.

Hello.

I have the 2.26 Macbook and about 85 euros worth of credit at a local PC store. In my last Fujitsu Amilo Pi2530 replacing the 5400RPM drive with a 7200 Scorpio Black 160gb did wonders for performance and it could be a placebo effect, but I actually think it helped battery.

Since I already got 4gb of RAM, I am thinking of upgrading my HD (Hitachi HTS545016B9SA02). One option is the Scorpio Blue 500GB for it's sheer storage, the other is to upgrade performance without a cost on battery life with a fast single platter drive.

So which one is the biggest out there?

 

Better, more power efficient specs and much faster than anything else out there is the $80 newegg 500GB 7K500 7200 RPM Hitachi.

Single platter is highly over-rated and can even be detrimental to IOPS's.

 

Single platter?

Largest one available IIRC are 250 or 320. But I dont get it why single platter?

The dual platters offer more capacity and feel somewhat faster.

 

for battery savings and noise alone. I could be wrong but I think that they are somewhat ligher on consumption and definitelly less vibrant.

 

I think you're wrong (at least for the 7K500?).

 

Yes, they consume less than single platters.

But if silence and noise are the problems you want to avoid, a SSD seems like the best solution...albeit somewhat pricier.

 

I'd love an SSD but I use 2-3 VM's daily with quite some software in each so I'd have to go with the intel 160gb which is about 5 times what I am willing to spend.

I am reading good things about the 7k500.

With my 160GB hitachi I can't even tell it's there. I wonder how much worse the 7200 will be.

 

Not too much worse considering the performance gains it offers?

 

Still not sure if that or 8gb of ram will have the greater impact in my use-scenario.

 

I might be able to answer that for you (I just recently upgraded to 8GB from 4 on Win 7 x64).

What do you need your computer for?

 

Where did you get this info from? The single platter consumes less power than the 2 platter version, has less noise, and is faster since it the head has to move less distance.

 

Where? Just reading around, but here's one recent one from here.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=5562905&postcount=3

And no, the head doesn't move less - it doesn't matter how many platters it has (for the same capacity).

If you're getting the same density but less total capacity, then maybe the heads might move a little less, but otherwise (full platter capacity models), they will be the same.

 

I think the single platter drives are better than their dual platter counterparts in pretty much every aspect except size. Your link didn't really show anything...

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=3778766&postcount=18
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=4682334&postcount=5
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=3916711&postcount=2
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=5503796&postcount=6
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=5296869&postcount=15

 

Interesting, but also doesn't prove anything.

Also, the last link is refuted just five replies below the one you linked.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=5297018&postcount=20

So, where does this leave us?

Back to the start - that unless you're spinning down the HD and starting up again, there is little extra power used for dual platters and for vibrations - a single can vibrate just as much - within manufacturer's allowable variances.

Head distance travelled doesn't depend on how many platters on the drive - it depends on how much the manufacturer 'fills' the platter from the outermost writable track to the innermost writable track. As long as the platter used inside is the same density/sqin in both the single and dual platter HD's, then the head distance will also be the same.

As to noise, yes it might be 'louder' than a single platter - but the difference is so small, that unless you're in a tomb, they'll both get drowned out by an old clock ticking on the wall.

Edit: Also, a dual platter drive has twice as much capacity at its sweet spot: the beginning, or fastest part of the drive. Usually, this is enough for the O/S to reside in (by intelligent partitioning) and ensure the O/S is always performing as fast as possible.

 

True, while benchmarks and theories can show one thing, real life differences won't be noticeable.