Seagate Momentus 7200.2 vs Hitachi Travelstar 7K200

I'm looking to buy a 200GB 7200RPM drive for my laptop and these two appear to be the only ones on the market. I've heard many glowing reviews for the Hitachi, unfortunately the performance seems to be matched by its high price. The Seagate Momentus is around £20 cheaper for the 200GB model. How does it fare performance wise. Is it near identical (ie. within about 5-10%) or is there a bigger rift between these two drives.

 

I haven't found any reviews of the Seagate. As you may know there are reviews of the Hitachi on storagereview.com

 

Tom's Hardware guide provides some nice 2.5" HD comparisons. I don't think they've tested the performance of the 200GB Travelstar yet but you can compare the 7200.2 to a 100GB Travelstar. Find the charts here.

If performance is your main concern, my guess would be the Seagate will outperform. However, the price/performance won't be as good.

 

You wouldn't be able to tell the difference between the two drives.

 

where do you base this on?

 

Have a look through this thread and that thread.

I think you will find some relevant results.

John

 

That's a different Seagate model (160GB) and a different Hitachi model (7K100).

 

Thanks, I'd already read the first thread but I found a benchmark on the second one (page 5) where someone benchmarked the Seagate 200GB drive. Performance looked near identical to that of the 7K200. Looks like I'll just be getting whatever is cheaper! Thanks.

 

Going by those HD tune results the seagate is even better.

I hope that the different systems did not have too much influence on the benchmark.

 

I'd say it wouldn't really matter.

 

This review will answer all of your questions - http://www.storagereview.com/HTS722020K9A00.sr?page=0,0

According to this, the 7K200 is the faster than the 7200.2. But it does carry quite a price premium.

 

That is actually the 160GB version of the seagate, so it can not be compared.

I believe the HD tune results are quite clear. The 200GB disks perform very similar.

 

However, similarity in basic read / write performance may not also mean similarity in the other tests. Tom's Hardware has various tests in which differences show up between otherwise similar HDDs. The trouble is, I haven't a clue whether any of these other tests provide a fair indication of real life performance in a notebook.

Comparing the HDtune results, I notice that the one results for a Seagate 200GB 7200 shows a much higher temperature. However, this might be a reflection of the notebook it was tested in. Some notebooks keep their HDDs warmer than others.

John

 

You can not compare HDD of different sizes as the "stored data density" is different.

 

Although HDTune benchmarks are almost identical each drive is optimized for different environments.

 

The one interesting thing is that the 7K200 review as it was compared to the 7200.2 I do not think listed anything in terms of what capacity was the 7K200 being tested. What surprised me was that the 7K200 is only SATA I, whereas the 7200.2 is SATA II capable. I understand that most drives out there cannot really even reach the 150 MB/sec mark, but I have seen SATA II HDDs go over the 150MB/sec mark in terms of burst rates. My 7K200 only tops out at around 95MB/sec.

 

Whoa, that is pretty good there. My 7200.2 tops out at 76MB/sec........

 

interesting...

one thing i wondered about also from the StorageReview.com article is about the AAM and power related settings - granted i didn't read all 8 pages, but it'd been nice to see if AAM was enabled/disabled / APM also, as the 7K200 has these features, and I'm sure Seagate has similar offerings.

 

You think that is impressive, I have two 7K200 200Gb drives in Raid 0 in my ENVY U709. I get an average of 103.2mb/sec, a max of 126.7 and a min of 87, with a burst of 165.1mb/sec.

Ah the power of Raid 0.

Go for Hitachi, they make better drives than Seagate. Every Hitachi I have ever had has run much better and has lasted longer than any Seagate I have ever owned.

K-TRON

 

That's cool. I hope you are putting those 2 puppies to good use

I am just using my 7K200 for my T60... where I dont do anything intensive