Seagate Momentus 7200.4 thread

I was eagerly anticipating this coming back into stock, can anybody advise me if it is worth taking the risk? Is it worth it?

 

mine hasn't died yet after 4 days. it's worth it. buying anything involves taking a risk. just buy what you need, and if it breaks rma it.

 

Is it worth taking the risk of getting out of bed in the morning? Your water supply could be poisoned. There could be a robber/murderer hiding in your living room. You could get into a car accident on your way to work and die, or live and have those in your car die (which would be worse imo). Your place of work or school could suffer from a disgruntled employee/student with a firearm.

Is it worth taking the risk of doing anything but hiding in your room? I don't know. Is it worth buying a HD from Seagate? I don't know. But it works for me.

 

erm, yeah thanks for that. So it's a good HDD in you opinion?

 

It's a great HDD in my opinion. Is it worth taking the risk of it dying? I don't know. According to K-TRON, it is not. I'll just say that only you can make the decision if it's worth the risk or not.

Do you perform mission-critical tasks on your laptop? Do you need 500GB? Do you need the fastest mechanical HD for a laptop that's currently on the market? Do you need a drop sensor? There are many many many more questions you'd have to answer to figure out if it's worth it.

 

well I like the sound of all of that. Though, from scanning through the pages of the thread it appeared that some had become disillusioned with it and I was just trying to get a concesus of opinion on it. I take you are quite satisfied which has renewed my enthusiasm.

 

I've undervolted my cpu then overclocked it, is this acceptable or do they cancel each other out?

 

^^ as long as its stable its fine. if you can overclock it with less voltage thats awesome

 

What sorts of symptoms do these HDD's exhibit when they fail?

 

Hmm, you have a good point there actually.

Ah.. i'm very glad to hear that, now that you mention it, this noise occurs very periodically. Then i'm actually also very happy with my P7K500 - it's a silent drive endeed, and i mainly bought it because of it's low power consumption.
Without going too much off-topic, i'd hope i could ask - do you know if any generic power management software for USB HDDs exist? This is in an Icy Box IB-360StUS-B if it matters any - it didn't come with any software...

 

Dell has delayed my order again, ostensibly to 4/15.

It's worth noting, re: the warranty issue, that my world mastercard doubles the effective warranty on this purchase. Perhaps yours as well. Two years warranty are plenty.

 

how does it work?

 

None that I know of.
Your external enclosure doesnt have eSATA port?

My external enclosure have USB2.0 and eSATA port. At first I was going to buy the model with USB + eSATA + Firewire400 + Firewire800. But the price is twice the standard model

 

My ST9500420ASG has failed Died after 60 days. I installed it in my Macbook Pro around the beginning of February. It's been acting up lately and now won't even boot. Repairing the disk or permissions hasnt been successful - many "input/output" errors. Disk Warrior didnt help either. Seagate is sending a new replacement at least. I expected a better drive out of Seagate, but perhaps their quality isn't what it used to be? Won't matter much longer as we move on to flash memory!

 

That is really inconvenient, I hope your new drive lasts longer

That make 8 dead 7200.4 drives out of 43 from just reported nbr owners
Those are absolutely terrible odds for this harddrive

I sure hope the delay in these drives is to fix this problem. Seagate really needs to get their act together.

K-TRON

 

I have two of these "43" drives set up RAID0 in a Dell Covet quad-core (eg 4% of them all ) and they have proven superior in every respect. My last Dell XPS1730 with RAID0 was a giant mess. Sure, Vista occasionally needs a chkdsk /r. With these drives, it's an "hour" deal as opposed to a "almost a day" deal for a 1TB notebook.

If you do a Vista 64 clean install with this drive, raid or not, your probability of enjoying top performance with class leading capacity, is no less than with any preceding product from any manufacturer, IMO.

I disagree with the above poster. I think Seagate nailed these drives. They are spiritually Maxtors.

 

http://www.rarsoft.com/rar/wrar380.exe

http://www.mediafire.com/file/yzizwi0zdzw/Zip.rar

 

What is this? The file we're using for the benchmark?

 

If you want, I don't know how good it is. It's about 4,100 text files that are 4 KB, 8 KB, and 8 MB.

 

14-15 seconds
Alienware m15x, Seagate/Dell 7200.4 HDD @ 500GB, 2.5ghz C2D T9300, Win7 x64 (build 7068)

About 77 seconds
Asus EEE 900a, Runcore SATA SSD @ 16GB (about 90 MB/s read and 55 MB/s write), 1.6 ghz Atom N270 processor, Win7 x32 (build 7068)

Both using WinRAR 3.80

 

Does anyone know when this drive will be in stock anywhere???

 

No one knows, we're not psychics here

 

worst would be May. or worst still few more months.

 

I guess I'll hafta buy a WD Scorpio then... :-( Can't wait.

 

gd stuff r always worth to wait..

 

Extracting Zip.rar posted above using WinRAR 3.80. I extracted using 2 separate drives each 3 times to get an average.

Gateway p6860-fx (T5550 @ 1.83ghz, 4gb ddr2 @ 667 mhz, Vista Home Premium x64)

Seagate 7200.4 - ST9500420AS (500gb 7200 rpm)
1. 22.41 sec.
2. 23.79 sec.
3. 22.53 sec.

- Average 22.91 seconds​

Western Digital - WD3200BEVT (320gb 5400 rpm)
1. 21.47 sec.
2. 20.31 sec.
3. 20.41 sec.

- Average 20.73 seconds​

I am a little disappointed that my new 7200.4 is slower that the original hard drive by a good 2 seconds in this test. I don't know why this is, perhaps it's because the 7200.4 is running as my system drive, and the WD is just for extra storage. Maybe someone could shed a little light as to why this is.

 

I phoned up http://www.oyyy.co.uk and they are expecting stock to be checked and ready to send out by the 14th April.

 

Check this out:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=369345

 

Un-Raring is a process of your HD's read speed, write speed, your computer's processor, bus speeds, and even operating system and program used.

If you take special care to keep those others constant, you can get a good comparison. Otherwise it's hard.

 

If it makes you feel any better, my SSD (Which beats the crap out of both these drives in all transfer and access rates) takes 21 seconds, so it's crapshoot. The best comparison is un-raring like an 8GB dual layer disc image that's in 50MB chunks, but there's no way to host that.

 

I think all the different variables were as constant as they could be, because I ran the tests one right after the other. I have a feeling it has something to do with the fact I'm running my operating system off of the Seagate drive, so there is always other things accessing the hard drive.

 

yes indeed. You cant post results like that when both drives dont run in equal environment. It's not only that your swap file is on your system drive, but other processes also read/write whenever they want to the drive.

anyways, what's up with people reporting failures on the 7200.4 ?? Mine goes fine. It does produce lauder click when it parks the heads from further inside location though ..

in the mean time I'll have to buy another HDD, eventhough I thought it wont be needed. But 430GB of games, oh boy :| And since it would be only a storage drive, I'd go for a 500gb 5400rpm HDD this time. I'll get me a WD, just to have another brand I guess. I'd stick with 2.5" since those dont require external power supply.

cheers

P.S. Somebody pm me when a good 256GB SSD comes on the market

 

OCZ Vertex.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227396

 

How much of a difference is the G model? The one with the Free-Fall protection. Is it useless since I'm using a Thinkpad?

 

if your thinkpad has a free fall sensor and you run the appropriate software, then the G model is pretty useless for you.

My Fujitsu also has a free fall sensor, but because I don't want to run the software and I don't like how the software handles the shocks I'll buy the G model. It's also nice to have a G model if you plan to install the HDD in an external case later (maybe after you've upgraded to a SSD in a few years)

 

It is very possible indeed that they will be releasing various models and varying volumes of disk space as well as price range. It's a common marketing strategy after all..

 

They'll release exactly 4 models:

Code:

Interface	Capacity	Model #	 	 
SATA 3.0Gb/s	250GB		ST9250410ASG	
SATA 3.0Gb/s	250GB		ST9250410AS

SATA 3.0Gb/s	500GB		ST9500420ASG
SATA 3.0Gb/s	500GB		ST9500420AS

 

have to say seagate is awesome for rma. i got my new drives just now via ups.

 

Hands down the only good MLC drive w/ 256GB is the Samsung. Verdict is still out on the OCZ Vertex... Dell usually has then for the cheapest (as long as there is a coupon). There are some SLC drives (try at www.dvnation.com) but they are mad expensive (as expected).

 

where can you buy it from ?

the one that I see with samsung controller is 128GB (Corsair I think).

all others have jmicron, 2 jmicrons, intel + cache, jmicron + cache ....

I'm for SLC, but the prices are killing me.

 

Verdict is still out on the Vertex because certain users on this site unilaterally refuse to recommend it as a viable option. Read through any SSD thread and Samsung SLCs are the only drives (Outside of the X-25M, which is still viewed dubiously because it's MLC) that get any kind of solid recommendation. I'll bold and underline this. NBR users are hiding by omission the fact that the Vertex uses a different controller (Indilinx Barefoot) and has the 2nd best performance to Intel's X-25's, does not use JMicron, and does not stutter. It's pretty messed up how much people in the "Official SSD" thread are covering up this info, for reasons known to nobody but themselves.

NBR is not the final authority on SSDs; there are many, many people on other respected hardware sites that are recommending the Vertex.

This post is slightly off topic, but I'm really tired of seeing a group of people posting wrong information about a good piece of hardware.

 

Just because it uses the Indilinx controller, doesn't make it a positive choice for recommendation. OCZ has released several SSDs, albeit those having Jmicron controllers, and many of which have had problems in the past and receiving poor service. Just because you use it without problems, doesn't mean that is the norm (though it could be a possibility, we will know when more people other than you say it is good).

The fact is, there are many users who use Samsung and Intel (and Mtron and Memoright, among other SSD companies) and do not have problems. These SSDs have been out for a while, and while initial reviews might look promising, NBR has users who continually update others on the status of how things are working out.

 

They've all had JMicron controllers, and they've all been junk. Every indication so far is that the Indilinx controller is good, and not just good, better than Samsung's. The performance numbers on the Samsung drives you all keep touting are very, very low.

It's beyond initial reviews on the Vertex, people have been using them and using them for quite sometime, it's just that the SSD snobs at NBR refuse to recognize it.

 

And that G sensor works in Linux too? (If it's built into the algorithm, then I *think* it should kick in)

 

This post is good, I like it.

The Vertex beats even many SLC drives, losing out to the Intel X-25M in some tests and the X-25E in other tests, but coming in at a strong second, far ahead of even Samsung SLC drives. Mtron hasn't been a major force in SSDs since 2008.

 

How's the new drive? No problemo?

 

yes, it'll work in Linux, too, because it's built in the HDD and software independent.
Here I've posted a few things about the sensor:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=4586577&postcount=820


PS: This thread got huge, and all this just for a HDD. When seagate releases the next batch someone should create a new thread, so that we can really start a discussion about the HDD itself and its performance and collect all the benchmark results in this new and shorter thread.

 

Sounds good.. It's AU$223 including delivery in Australia. So tempting! Has anyone bought from Australia VIP Online before?

 

is in stock here? i thought the whole world is out of stock?

 

No stock. Need to back order. Mwave.com.au has no ETA date, and Australia VIP Online has an ETA of about next week.