Samsung Spinpoint m7 640gb or WD Blue Scorpio 500gb?

I want to upgrade my laptop's hard drive to either WD Blue Scorpio 500gb or Spinpoint m7 640gb. They both cost approx the same (£59)

Obviously, m7 is more spacious, but I am having some reliability concerns. Is it a reliable hard drive?

Should I look for alternative HDDs, like Hitachi 500gb?

 

People swear by the Hitachi, but I've primarily used Western Digital in my laptops and desktops and home server and had zero issues to date.

 

I would choose the WD5000bevt over the Samsung 640GB for performance reasons. I'd choose the Hitachi 7K500 over WD5000bevt for the same reasons.

But if it's capacity you're after you may as well get a 750GB drive, if your budget allows it.

For reliability WD and Hitachi are both fine imo.

 

You can compare features such as performance and power consumption at Tom's Hardware. However, the drives are obsolete by the time long term reliability data become available so one has to rely on user reports of particular problems. I can remember reading of any significant reliability issues with any of the recent 2.5" HDDs.

Regarding the 750GB option, these still command a price premium as the largest capacity in the 9.5mm thick size. 640GB gives more capacity per £.

John

 

Seagate Momentus 640GB is getting good reviews and it's very quiet.

However, WD and Hitachi are often seen as more reliable than Seagate, in general.

 

Thanks for the replies!

I have read some quite nasty reviews of recent 3.5" Samsung drives. Hopefully, QC in 2.5" production lines is better.

Performance is not the main issue- the differences are rather small and I doubt whether I would spot anything in the real life. However, storing tons of RAW images does need a lot of space....

Thanks John for the link- it is awesome

 

Small differences? It depends.. I would not be surprised if the Hitachi 7K500 loads Photoshop twice as fast as that Samsung drive.

This shows how much faster Scorpio Black 7200rpm drive can be then it's 5400rpm counterpart, the Scorpio Blue:

( source)

I'd expect the difference between Hitachi 7K500 and Samsung to be similar.

 

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/chart...tml?prod[3301]=on&prod[4051]=on&prod[3298]=on

I am absolutely happy with performance of stock MBP 250gb HDD. For me, additional 140gb is more important than approx 10-20% bump in speed

 

Unfortunately every single one of those benchmarks is synthetic. Real world performance is a different story. The review I quoted above shows real world performance.

But if you want to use synthetic benchmarks I'd look at PCMark Vantage Total Score. In absence of real life benchmarks that is the best alternative to predict real world performance.

Hitachi 7K500 4638
Samsung M7 3338
WD5000bevt 2979

Toshiba 640GB could be interesting. Perfoms better than Samsung and costs 64 GBP
http://www.google.co.uk/products/ca...og_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CCkQ8wIwAg#

 

Then again, I am hardly ever pushing my PC to the limits, so Super Stress conditions will not occur to often. In normal conditions, all differences are relatively small.

Furthermore, 4gb of RAM allows me to run Photoshop, MS Word, Safari and a whole bunch of other soft in parallel, so starting up times do not really matter....

Toshiba looks interesting, although a little expensive. The cheapest option is >£70 inc. VAT + shipping...

 

if u don't mind , try the 500GB hitachi 7K500 from amazon.. its about 68 pounds and seriously , for the price u pay and performance u get , its worth it.. nothing beats it..

500GB Travel 7K500 High Performance SATA Mobile Hard: Amazon.co.uk: Electronics & Photo

 

4 months later I followed your advice.

The 7k500 appears to be much faster than the old 250gb 5400rpm (stock MBP 13"). However, I started noticing rather some vibration. The sensation is not very pleasant, esp when PC is on my lap. Is that normal?

 

One 7K500 can vibrate more than the other. It seems you're a bit unlucky. Or maybe you are more sensitive to it.