Seagate Momentus 7200.4 thread

Can't wait for a showdown between Hitachi, Samsung, Seagate, and WD

Btw, IIRC, K-Tron recommend PCMark to benchmark HDD instead of HDTune, anyone try that yet?

 

http://www.mastercard.com/us/personal/en/cardholderservices/guidetobenefits/

See 'Extended Warranty Coverage':

Extended Warranty
Extend the warranty of your World MasterCard purchases by up to an additional twelve (12) months from the original warranty with this insurance program benefit. Certain restrictions and exclusions apply.

 

not yet so far so good..

 

good to know

thanks

 

I can only think this delay in product is them trying to fix the issues... I hope.

 

Glad to be helpful in a forum rather than just asking questions as I usually do!

 

funny, on 04-06-2009 I looked at the Seagate page and posted here that they'll only release 4 models, now I've visited the Seagate page again, and there are 8 models listed now:
http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/products/laptops/momentus/momentus_7200.4/

Code:

Interface	Capacity	Model #	 	 
SATA 3.0Gb/s	160GB		ST9160412AS	
SATA 3.0Gb/s	160GB		ST9160412ASG	
SATA 3.0Gb/s	250GB		ST9250410AS	
SATA 3.0Gb/s	250GB		ST9250410ASG	
SATA 3.0Gb/s	320GB		ST9320423AS	
SATA 3.0Gb/s	320GB		ST9320423ASG	
SATA 3.0Gb/s	500GB		ST9500420AS	
SATA 3.0Gb/s	500GB		ST9500420ASG

They also updated their data sheets with these 'new' drives. So hopefully they'll release them finally.

 

Nice catch... Hmm it seems to get even more "crazy" than that. See
http://www.seagate.com/staticfiles/...ook/momentus/7200.4 (Holliday)/100534376a.pdf

There's also a 120 GB version it seems

 

yeah..rite. 120gb version also hav. product manual stated it was out on Jan 09. so mayb tat was when after the 1st batch is already out.

 

Has anybody heard anything about WD releasing a 500gb Scorpio Black to match the 7200.4?

 

Nothing yet from WD, hitachi etc. that has 250GB/platter @ 7200 RPM...


--

 

Sigh.. Still waiting for stock..

 

Im so glad I decided not to wait for this one and got the Scorpio Black. Sure, would've got a bit more performance but at the time (2 months ago!!) it was going to be at least a month's wait and I'd still be waiting. Not worth the wait nor the extra money that little bit of performance, for me.

 

^^
It depends. if you're in hurry, it's not worth the wait

 

Long time lurker. 1st time poster. Been following this thread with interest, as I want one of these 7200.4 500gig's for my PS3. A mate just informed me today he has 2 of them! I suspect he may have got them shipped with his new dell or alienware laptop, so they are definitely in the OEM market. I am meeting him this evening and hope to borrow even possibly buy one of the drives from him. If I succeed I'll post any relevant info, regarding model no., serial no., firmware revision etc.. Then run some benchmarks.

 

It's funny that parts of this thread, if not all of it, when taken out of context look more like the discussion of an illegal narcotic.

 

which post sounds like discussion of illegal narcotic?

 

IDK, "my friend just got 2! must be on the market somewhere... going to meet and maybe buy one off of him, let you know how the product is..."

Maybe it's just me

 

Am now proud owner of a 500gig 7200.4. firmware 001dem1. model no. st9500420asg. Dell, alienware and afew others are shipping these in notebooks now. This is going into the PS3 tomorrow. Will take some pics before i do.

 

Finally someone has done some real life testing:

"and then moved a 5.46 GB folder to and from the Seagate Momentus 7200.4 500GB HDD and timed the process with a stopwatch. ....

Comparing that performance to the Hitachi 5400 rpm hard drive shows a virtual dead heat with the Seagate taking 3 seconds longer to write the data to the disk."
http://www.i4u.com/full-review-529.html

3 seconds slower than a 5400 rpm disk... it seems that Seagate is still suffering from slow I/O.

 

Wow, kinda disappointing that the 7200.4 has all of that bandwidth and yet it is barely faster than a 5400rpm drive in real life.
Hopefully some more real life benchmarks can either back up or refute that claim.

It is so easy to benchmark a drive. Download crystalmark DiscMark and hit go. Take a shower and come back and its done. Upload your results and you make all of us happy.
Maybe if youre lucky you get some rep from Phil, I or others

K-TRON

 

if that's true, I'll be moving to that new Hitachi expeditiously. In fact, I might order one of the Hitachi's explicitly for testing and comparison purposes. I'll take the restocking fee hit for the opportunity to confirm or deny this (though I'd like to think some professional review site would get to it sooner).

I just don't understand how this happens on a drive with an average of 20MB/s faster transfer speed...but then again, on that same website they found the Hitachi drive has faster access times (15ms vs. 16.23ms). Does that ~1.23ms difference really make up for what appears to be such a large transfer speed difference?

Edit: I have to take that last analysis back too. According to the review, using the same benchmarking software, the Momentus posted faster transfer speeds AND a 1ms faster access time (14ms vs. 15ms).

What gives.

Edit 2: ...and how in the verdict of that review ( http://www.i4u.com/verdict-529.html) do they in one breath say that the performance is great...then in the next breath say that the drive shows no proof of better performance in REAL WORLD TESTS? If it doesn't show a speed increase in real-world testing relative to the Hitachi 5400rpm drive, how do you justify saying it's better than said 5400rpm hdd? Isn't it all about real-world results? After all, theoretical performance is not what I want to pay for...

 

--------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 2.2 (C) 2007-2008 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
--------------------------------------------------

Sequential Read : 68.211 MB/s
Sequential Write : 72.798 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 28.581 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 45.715 MB/s
Random Read 4KB : 0.375 MB/s
Random Write 4KB : 0.754 MB/s

Test Size : 100 MB
Date : 2009/04/17 0:10:39

 

Interesting, thank you for sharing +34 rep to you

Here is the crystalmark for my Hitachi 7K320 (160GB)
The exact model of my drive is: HTS723216L9A



Oddly enough the 7K320 is faster at small files than the seagate 7200.4
I figure this is because I have a single platter solution, which is generally faster at seeking than a multiple platter harddrive

K-TRON

 

As you probably know Crystal mark is a synthetic benchmark.

I'd like to see more real life benchmarking. Going by the review mentioned earlier and Seagate´s traditional slower I/O I wouldn't be surprised if the WD3200BEKT is faster in real life than the 7200.4.

 

My WD3200BEVT is a 2 platter 320GB 5400RPM w/ CrystalDiskMark 2.2 at 5x 100MB spanks the transfer rate off the 7K320. Besides from the access times being higher, you'd think the transfer rates would be better on the 7200RPM drive...

Seq R/W: 51.54/53.29
512K R/W: 24.14/37.50
4K R/W: 0.386/1.292

HDTune access time is 17.2ms w/ avg of 48.7MB/s.

 

I installed my momentus 7200.4 into my PS3 last night. Sorry, didn't bother doing benchmarks on my pc before hand.

But here is what I noticed for those with PS3's that might be interested :

Pro's
1. Boots noticably faster and loads games slightly quicker than stock 80gig hitachi ps 3 drive
2. Seek noise is definitely quieter than stock ps3 drive
3. No noticeable increase in noise from PS3 fans, so heatoutput for this 7200rpm drive seems to be around the same as alot of high capacity 5400rpm drives (which corresponds to what the specs say).

Cons
1. Drive make a scratching noise for about 3 seconds when initialising
2. About every 20-30 seconds or so can hear a faint whistling noise from drive which lasts about 2 seconds. Can obvioulsy only here it when drive is idling (on PS3 XMB for example), so perhaps it's some sort of power saving that is kicking in intermittently.

If anyone is installing this drive in their PS3, they should know everything went smooth. Even though the previous owner had it formatted as a windows drive with ntfs, the PS3 still picked it up on bootup and did a quick format. After that, the PS3 prompted to insert a memory stick with latest firmware (PS3 firmware is split between onboard flash and drive), which I did, and drive subsequently got flashed. PS3 system information reports the drive capacity as 465gig.

 

Seagate 7200.2 120gb drive, ST9120823AS


CrystalDiskMark 2.2 (C) 2007-2008 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
--------------------------------------------------

Sequential Read : 51.654 MB/s
Sequential Write : 49.206 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 27.293 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 29.122 MB/s
Random Read 4KB : 0.462 MB/s
Random Write 4KB : 0.826 MB/s

Test Size : 100 MB
Date : 2009/04/17 14:28:52
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
------------
(1) ST9120823AS : 120.0 GB [0-2-0, pd1]




I need more space for Windows 7 and stuff, don't know if i wait for the 500gb 7200.4 or should i buy a 320gb 7200er WD or .3 Seagate.?

 

Can anyone do a comparison with the Hitachi 5400rpm 500Gb one?

 

Both are tested and compared here: http://www.i4u.com/full-review-529.html

 

Eventually I want to get a second one of these Seagate drives to run in RAID 0. Right now the only place that seems to have them is DELL, but all they have is the one with the free fall sensor. Would there be any problem running RAID where one drive has the free fall sensor and the other doesn't?

 

How much faster is this 7200.4 compared to Hitachi 7K320, I am buying a 7K320 because I can find it at a good price, but if this Seagate is significantly faster, is it worth waiting?

 

just a little bit faster.
its the capacity that people wants.

 

The free fall sensor is just an accelerometer it will stop the disk if it detects an abnormal acceleration. In a normal situation it doesn't interfere with the hard drive so raid should work fine.

 

Going by the first real life benchmarks it isn't any faster. You won't be able to notice a difference in real life.

 

Alright thanks! I thought I remember reading somewhere that some people had trouble with their drives kicking in and out of free fall mode with only slight bumps or vibrations, causing slowdowns. I just didn't know if this would cause a problem for the non g-shock drive in a RAID 0 array.

 

I ordered a Vaio FW series notebook earlier this weekend and I opted for the cheapest RAM and hard drive options, figuring I'd upgrade them later at a greatly reduced price. I ordered the RAM last night but am still holding off on the hard drive. I had my mind set on the WD 500 GB 5400 RPM drive (Scorpio Blue, or something of that nature), but I began contemplating the 7200 RPM drive, for increased performance.

I just looked at New Egg's selection of 500GB drives again and read a thread about the Hitachi 5400 RPM that claims to be feature the lowest power consumption in its class. It is also only $80 after MIR. That is a whopping $60 difference, so I think I have pretty much settled on that drive unless the WD 7200 RPM drive proves to be a large enough performance boost. Unfortunately, there are no reviews on the site yet so I'm going to do some digging around and see what feedback I can find. I'd hate to end up with an unreliable drive.

I read a bunch of reviews on New Egg and one thing in particular caught my eye, and it has been discussed quite a bit in the few posts I've read in this thread: it does not seem to offer much of a performance boost when compared to a comparable 5400 RPM drive. I am a bit of a budget buyer so I would like some confidence that the extra $40 would be well spent.

Someone mentioned in their review that Seagate was doing "engineering updates". Has anyone heard about this? I would love to get a 7200 RPM 500 GB drive if the performance exceeded that of the slower drive.

 

I assume these results are for the 7200.4. They can be compared with



which shows, left to right, the results for the Hitachi 5k500.B, the WD5000BEVT and the Seagate 5400.6.

Note the WD's class-leading write performance.

John

 

but how does that make sense?

the 7200.4 trailing all 5400rpm drives?

 

Are those your OS drives, or secondary/storage drives?

They will give different numbers.

 

Yes they are three different drives so different results are to be expected: From left to right: Hitachi 5k500.B, the WD5000BEVT and the Seagate 5400.6. The read performances are similar but the write performances are more variable.

The 5K500.B is in the computer and the other two were tested in an eSATA enclosure.

We need some more results for the 7200.4 for comparison.

John

 

The Hitachi is in the computer = system drive?

please test Hitachi as external eSATA too.

 

Crystal mark varies by how you partition your drive greatly.

I have a WD3200BJKT, the 7200rpm scorpio black as my system drive in a macbook pro. I partitioned it as, 60G for mac OS, 200G for windows(drive C), 40G for data(drive D).

for drive C, it reads
--------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 2.2 (C) 2007-2008 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
--------------------------------------------------

Sequential Read : 74.483 MB/s
Sequential Write : 72.606 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 35.916 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 55.428 MB/s
Random Read 4KB : 0.524 MB/s
Random Write 4KB : 1.425 MB/s

Test Size : 100 MB
Date : 2009/04/21 0:58:21

for drive D, it reads
--------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 2.2 (C) 2007-2008 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
--------------------------------------------------

Sequential Read : 54.036 MB/s
Sequential Write : 51.897 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 32.920 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 43.138 MB/s
Random Read 4KB : 0.580 MB/s
Random Write 4KB : 1.494 MB/s

Test Size : 100 MB
Date : 2009/04/21 1:00:52

According to how you partition your harddisk, different drives will be located at different places of the platter which then affects the sequential read/write performance. I guess if I can have a better result if i can run crystal mark in MAC OS.

 

Of course they're different models.

I'm asking is the OS in which the benchmark is being run installed on all 3 drives, or are they being tested as secondary drives?

This matters because HDs being benchmarked will give worse numbers if they're also the system drive, as they have a pretty big application that's always running and doing drive read/writes... the OS.

 

yeah, +1 with Koshinn.

All the HDD tested have to have the same condition.
If 1 is using an eSATA enclosure, the other have to.

 

agreed.

I have 2 coming in the mail on Wednesday or Thursday. I'll toss it in an enclosure and post results.

 

2 of what? WD HDD or Hitachi HDD?

 

2 of the 5K500.B's. they're only $80 right now after rebates at newegg.

will test them in an enclosure, post the results...then raid 0 them, drop my image one and post those results.

 

7200.4 has an average transfer: 80ish MB/s. I currently use WD3200BJKT that has 63MB/s. Will I feel a difference if I upgrade? Is it noticable?

 

It's not worth it, doubt you will notice a difference. Besides from transfer rate, there are many other factors that determine if a drive is better. Lower access time and R/W for large/small files.