PATA harddrives: Hitachi 5400rpm outperforming some 7200rpm drives

I was looking for a new harddrive for my older Asus laptop. (pata). I was planning to get a Seagate 7200.1 80GB.

I just read an article in the german magazine Chip. According to their test the Hitachi TS 5K160 160GB is faster than the Seagate. Since it's also twice as big for almost the same price, I've ordered the Hitachi.

Only the Hitachi 7K100 100GB gets a little higher transferrates and accestime, however it is slower with booting XP.

Oops wrong forum. mods can you move it? thanks

 

Post moved.

The higher data densities of higher capacity drives usually increases the data transfer rate.

You can compare results for many 2.5" HDDs at the Tom's Hardware 2.5" HDD charts. Probably the fastest PATA HDD is the WD2500BEVE because it is 250GB. However, older hardware may not support the full capacity. I read somewhere about a 137GB limit (which would not matter much with 160GB which is actually only 150GB).

John

 

John is it the higher capacity per se or is it the perpendicular storage technology which all have switched to which increases data density that explains the increase in speed?

 

Perpendicular recording is a way of achieving higher data densities (2.5" HDDs had hit a ceiling at about 120GB before perpendicular recording was implemented). And the higher the data density then the more data will pass under the head during one revolution. The speed of reading /writing data through the head is one of the key controlling factors in HDD performance. Hence the overall data transfer rates of top capacity 5400rpm and 7200rpm of the same generation being similar.

John

 

Just noticed that Hitachi has two very similar models:

HTS541616J9A
HTS541616J9AT00

According to the test the first one is quicker.

 

I have the 2nd, 40MB/s and 17ms RA

 

I've been recently comparison shopping for 2.5 pata drives and initially thought to buy the 7200.1 100GB model myself, thinking it to be the one of the "superior" drives (and having owned one in my Compaq R4000).

Looking at benches, the Samsung HM160JC 5400rpm model seems to beat it in some data transfer benches (but not all), and it uses way less power during idle. My current Compaq V5201 has the smaller HM120JC and it has been cool and quiet, so I assume the same for it's bigger brother. Samsung drives also appear to be the cheapest as well, so it is probably worth a try.

 

According to the benchmarks by Chip the HTS541616J9A is considerably faster than the HM160JC.

Unfortanetly Tomshardware tests the HTS541616J9AT00 and not the HTS541616J9A.

 

What about power usage? I found the Samsung to be extremely low, even more so than some smaller Seagate drives.

 

Both that Samsung and Hitachi take 1,3 Watt

Seagate 7200.1 1,5 watt
Hitachi 7K200 1,7 watt

 

I've also found the Samsung HDDs to be cool, and quiet. Hitachi's, on the other hand, can get somewhat noisy.

John

 

Wow, those numbers are different. According to Tom's, the Samsung is 0.5-2.6w, Seagate is 1.0-3.8w. Is the other bench referring to more nominal power usage?

 

It only says 'Leistungsaufnahme'. It's propably an average.

The numbers do make sense though if you compare to these:
http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/08/02/speed_or_capacity/page9.html#energy_requirements

Most of those drives are SATA though, the Chip benchmark only has PATA models.

 

Be careful when comparing the idle power of PATA and SATA HDDs.

There's something clever in the design of SATA which increases the idle power drain over the equivalent PATA HDD.

Another source of information is this review at Digit Life.

John

 

The fastest drive is the 200gb Hitachi, rite?

 

Seagate 7200.2 200 GB and Hitachi 7K200 200GB are the fastest SATA notebook drives. They perform very similar.