Seagate Momentus 7200.4 thread

Here you go... read only and a bit chunky because its now my system drive.

From 2.5 500gb 7200.4 seagate hard drive

From 2.5 500gb 7200.4 seagate hard drive

I plugged in a WD6400AAKS (3.5", 7200RPM, 640GB) drive as a reference and its not that much faster on average seeks- 16.1ms

 

One4spl,

how do you compare it with your samsung SSD 64gb? I have sony vaio Z and thinking of buying the ocz SSD 60gb (for $110) or the 128gb v2 ($230) after rebate. However, I read that SSD MLC have horrible write performance.

Please advise.

Thanks

 

umm... hard to tell really given that I ran vista on the SSD and Win7 on this. Boot time is still quite good... but i cant really bench it.

The samsung oem ssd is SLC, but its a bit slower than the new MLCs at streaming throughput maxing out about 100MB/sec.. but gets much better small IO write performance than the MLC cheapies.

The key benifit of the 500GB drive is that it *can* do what I want, whereas 64 or 128GB can't. Luckily i bought my E6500 with the SSD at auction so didnt pay the $1100AUD Dell ask for it as an option.

 

copying, moving files, accessing applications, downloading files, do you notice any change in speed? If the difference is minimal and can't be felt, then I guess it is better for me to go with the new 7200.4 drive.

The access time on the 7200.4 seems lower than in 7200.3!!

 

one4spl,

Thanks for the hdtune graphs. The second graph shows that the cpu utilization is -1.0%. So this means the new hdd is contributing to the processor power rather than wasting it, right?

 

Doesn't look that much faster than the wd5000bevt...

 

Awesome thanks for the bench.

 

Or that HDTune isnt working with Windows 7 that well... Take these charts with a grain of salt.

 

Are you sure? WD6400AAKS gives about 12-13ms in hdtune ( http://www.alphaq.org/enginurd/hdd/HDTune_Benchmark_WDC WD6400AAKS-00A7B.png), maybe there is something wrong with your esata or windows.

 

Checking cpu utilization isn't nescessary These numbers doesn't mean much. These apps shows whatever the cpu-load is, not what the hdd takes from the cpu in order to do what it should do. So it's kinda inaccurate, though there is not even a reasons to worry about such things as we have a lot of cpu-power today so that's the least problem


...i know you where just joking with the contributing thing

but i just wanted to add that info

 

WD500BEVT has ~60MB/sec average speed. This one is close to ~80MB/sec average speed, about 30% faster.

 

Yeah, thats my point, I dont think its getting good results running it in Windows 7.

 

So from what I understand, this drive is faster than the 320GB 7200RPM hard drives right?

 

Yes, and normally that is what it is supposed to be.

The new harddrive has higher data density on the platters compared to the 320GB. (250GB/platter vs. 160GB/platter)


--

 

Sweet...time to save up some cash.

 

I will be receiving this hard drive tomorrow and was wondering from the people that have it if it is running slower in the Windows 7 Beta than in Vista. Or if it is just the program doing the testing not getting good results. I am currently using Windows 7 and my hard drive is a 5400 250 gig one, and it only got a 2.0 rating in Windows 7 even though it had a 5.4 in Vista. I wonder if there is something wrong with the way the Beta Windows 7 handles SATA drives at the moment and I would be better off going back to Vista. Could someone using this drive in Windows 7 please post what the OS rated your HD please? Thank you

 

I will post a result by the end of the day

 

Thanks, much appreciated

 

Don't worry, I read somewhere that Win7 has a different rating system than Win Vista. I think they extended the scale to 12!! so don't worry if you have different (i.e. lower) ratings than Vista

 

No, the scale is simply extended (to 7.9), so you'll continue to get the same score for the same hardware. All that has changed is that you can now get a score higher than 5.9 if your hardware is faster than that.
Of course, Win7 is in beta, so you may well get unusual results for all sorts of reasons.

 

I wonder how much better 2 of these in Raid 0 would be against my current 2 500gb 5400rpm WD Drives??

 

Windows 7 beta gives a crappy score for HDDs if 'write caching' is enabled. For some reason...

 

Available now from newegg - free shipping!
http://www.tweaktown.com/news/11253/deal_of_the_dayindex.html

Placed my order - seems like I've been waiting forever!

 

Same here, I should be getting one of these bad boys tomorrow.

Would anyone happen to know how much faster this drive will feel over a 200GB 7200RPM Seagate 7200.3? I get a max transfer rate at 65 MB/s, with an average of about 52 MB/s. This drive hits 100 and averages at 80 so it looks a lot faster, but how much of that would you actually feel?

 

Yeah, but they only have the AS model, and I want the ASG (with the free-fall sensor)...

 

Thanks so much for this information. I disabled write caching and my score went from a 2.0 back to a 5.4. Do you know if this is just a glitch, or is my performance going to be better with it if I left it disabled. Another words would you recommend I leave it disabled or should I enable it because it is only a glitch in the way Windows 7 scores hard drives. Thanks again

 

you'll be able to feel it like you've been driving on 1st gear and you just shifted on 2nd

 

The Windows scores are useless. You'll be better off as soon as you start ignoring them.

 

well windows 7 seem to be more better benchmark then vista.

 

I found this forum through a link on macrumors. I have ordered this drive and anticipate delivery from Newegg in a couple of days. I have included a link which gives a quick Xbench test from a user. I'm still looking forward to giving the drive a go myself though.

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=643119&page=4

 

I find it odd that macrumors' test is so much slower than the tests we're running here on notebookreview. i know seagate is a win or lose situation tho as some are loud some are quiet and such

 

The HDD score in Windows 7 is 3.0 i don't understand why but my 7200.3 320Gb was 5.9 and i am pretty sure write cache was enabled ...

 

So on XBench, the WD 500 GB 5400 rpm is faster than 7200.4 500 GB 7200 rpm?

All that wait for nothing?!?

I just re-post the numbers here.

Seagate 7200.4 500 GB 7200 rpm

Xbench Version 1.3
System Version 10.5.6 (9G55)
Physical RAM 4096 MB
Model MacBookPro5,1
Drive Type ST9500420AS
Disk Test 36.83
Sequential 60.62
Uncached Write 99.59 61.15 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 76.92 43.52 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 57.50 16.83 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 39.13 19.67 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 26.45
Uncached Write 8.76 0.93 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 92.52 29.62 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 76.38 0.54 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 75.75 14.06 MB/sec [256K blocks]

WDC 500 GB 5400 rpm

Xbench Version 1.3
System Version 10.5.6 (9G55)
Physical RAM 4096 MB
Model MacBookPro4,1
Drive Type WDC WD5000BEVT-00ZAT0
Disk Test 52.46
Sequential 77.01
Uncached Write 93.70 57.53 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 123.82 70.05 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 37.87 11.08 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 147.36 74.06 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 39.78
Uncached Write 15.35 1.62 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 111.22 35.61 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 64.78 0.46 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 91.19 16.92 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Hitachi 7k320 320 GB 7200 rpm

Xbench Version 1.3
System Version 10.5.6 (9G55)
Physical RAM 2048 MB
Model MacBookPro5,1
Drive Type Hitachi HTS723232L9A360
Disk Test 42.38
Sequential 82.15
Uncached Write 119.83 73.57 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 83.78 47.40 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 47.73 13.97 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 134.08 67.39 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 28.56
Uncached Write 9.24 0.98 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 84.05 26.91 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 83.82 0.59 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 124.48 23.10 MB/sec [256K blocks]

 

Uh oh that's not good. Is that a reliable benchmarking tool? I've never heard of it.

 

I don't believe the benchmarking tool because it seems to hint that the writing speeds are faster than reading speeds, which shouldn't be accurate right?

 

Who knows, they could even work for WD or Hitachi

Im waiting for a lot more benchmarks because so far its all over the place

 

FrozenDarkness,

This wasn't a sanctioned test by Macrumors, but rather a forum member who ran his own test using Xbench. It's not a big deal at all, but I've observed that some people tend to read into comments and turn nothing into something.

 

HDTune and Xbench are synthetic benchmarks. Please take them with a grain of salt.

If someone could post some real life test results or appplication benchmarks that would be much more informative.

For example: in synthetic benchmarks the 7200.3 320GB is much faster than WD3200BEVT. In real life the WD32000BEVT is faster in some situations.

 

Which application benchmarks Phil?

I'll be getting my drive tomorrow so I could do this.

 

I know this may sound stupid but how to people measure application performance in terms of time? Rendering time? Load time etc..

Do people use a stop watch or is there a program that does the timing?

 

Look back on the Mac forum. The person who did the Xbench test was using a drive almost 100% full, which he cloned from another drive. When asked how much free space was on his new Seagate his responce was:

He then removed about 100 gigs and reran the test and here are his new results:

Quite a large difference. I don't think it is fair to benchmark a new hard drive when it is basically 100% full

 

the tests! I'm already getting my drive on the 5th and I dont wanna see negative benchmark tests.

 

The correctly tested results are fine IMO NCIX STILL doesn't have it though! BLEH

 

It is just a bug (in the Windows 7 HDD test). It doesnt make sense, because write caching is good for performance, so you should leave write caching 'enabled' and ignore the WEI score.

It is just a bug in the test, they will fix it eventually im sure.

 

If somebody could run PCmark HDD test on XP, that would be good.

And don't trust online posted benchmarks so much. Last time we have proved that Tom's hardware got their benchmark wrong.

 

Got my ASG version and put it in the MacBook Pro 17" and had a devil of a time to get the drive to format ("erase") / partition using the "disk utility" application (booting from the start-up DVD disk). It kept hanging on the "creating partition map." I took it to the apple store to have a mac "genius" look at it and he was of no help - said that the drive was probably bad! I came home and tried again - this time I booted from an external drive (which was the old drive) and then ran the "disk utility" from that and then used the "erase" function and it formatted the drive in 10 seconds. Now i'm restoring the old disk image to the new drive - says it has 7 hours left.

-update-
Old disk image has been restored on the ST9500420ASG and everything is working great. I'm very happy with the result - for me things seem to be a bit speedier and i have no issues with drive noise.

 

Don't know much about MacBook's but maybe it's possible that your MacBook only supports SATA I drives and you have to use maybe some Seagate tools to force the HDD to run in SATA I mode.

 

One more review... Got my toy today and installed Vista Business Ed. It is my system disk and therefore the graph has some glitches (due to some other processes accessing the disk at the same time.)

This is for Seagate Momentus 7200.4 (500 GB, 7200 RPM, 16 MB Buffer):



and this is for WD3200BEVT (320 GB, 5400 RPM, 8 MB Buffer). This was my previous (original) hard drive and the plot was taken in the same laptop that is in my sig.



Let me know if you have any more questions...


--

 

whats the noise like compared to your old 5400 drive?

 

I haven't noticed any difference. I think they are very similar.

During the seek, you can clearly hear the r/w head movements but it is not disturbing. During the idle, you can hear a constant whine which is not disturbing either... I can say that my laptop's cooling fan is clearly more noisy than the HDD.


--