Seagate Momentus 7200.4 thread

I know there are some mixed feelings about Tom's Hardware reviews, but they just released one that is pertinent to the discussion:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/mobile-hdd-notebook,2305.html


After reading this, although I loose some disk capacity (from 500GB to 320GB), I think the WD Black 320GB should fit my needs best. All the benefits of the WD Blue, but a bit faster since it's running at 7200RPM which should help with load times and multitasking.

I've been struggling with this for a while now... Not sure why there is so much delay in the WD Black 500GB though.

 

Guys, I've just mamaged to benchmarked by 500GB 7200.4 RAID 0 (1TB) drives, and this is the result I thought I'd like to share. I don't quite like the access time unfortunately.
But nevertheless these are just figures. My previous 7K320s were around there too.

 

i gave up on my 7200.4 500Gb and my corsair P256 just arrived today to replace it. my gawd. what a difference.

 

That's awesome SomeFormOFhuman! Did you notice a huge improvement over a single drive? I mean real life improvement?

 

Hmm, transfer speeds are faster over a single drive in RAID 0, like around 30-40% faster that sort of thing. In comparison over the WD500BEVT in RAID 0, (my friend has a Sony Vaio 18" incher with 2 of those) I just felt they're almost the same, software installation, access times, transfer speeds, loading a game, accessing a large 30GB folder transferring a 2GB .psd file, etc. The feel of it.

Overall, very good drives, having them for almost 3 months now. I guess it's the latest firmware from Seagate. I heard earlier releases were always crashing and had very slow transfer speeds something like that?

I got it for $125 on ebay.

Stefan

 

16.6ms is quite normal for the drive. I have 16.9 ms single drive. Here's my benchmark and yours side by side for comparison (single drive vs RAID 0).

 

my needs for a new drive are (video/audio production) already have a scorpio black 320 as my OS drive

1) sustained write/read scores
2) seek times

unless i'm misinformed, that's what i should be looking for in a hard drive for my needs.

basically my OS/programs are on the scorpio black, and all writing, recording, etc will be on this second drive. Possibly all saved projects will be on a seperate third esata drive.

i'd LIKE a 500gb drive, but the sustained reading/writes, seek times and overall speed is more important.

looks like the Scorpio Black is the best eh?

 

Thanks for the single drive test, hendra.

BTW does anyone know how to check the drive's firmware?

EDIT: Ran the test again to check that it wasn't a fluke... LOL. Yep checks out.


Also ran CrystalDiskMark:



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

Sequential Read : 154.202 MB/s
Sequential Write : 128.541 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 30.997 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 72.747 MB/s
Random Read 4KB : 0.428 MB/s
Random Write 4KB : 1.580 MB/s

Test Size : 100 MB
Date : 2009/06/22 11:58:02

 

Device Manager -> Harddrive Model Number -> Details Tab -> Hardware IDs.

Mine is 0001SDM1 (the first firmware)

 

Thanks, Hmm, I'm in RAID 0, and somehow I didn't manage to see my harddrive's model number in the device manager.

 

For one, I certainly envy (and respect) your capability in obtaining all the latest and greatest hardware, from the QX9300-equipped top of the line 8730w right through to this Corsair SSD. You truly appreciate the finer things in life.

 

I have 2 ST9500420ASG, but i also have clicking noise and between clicks laptop freezes. I checked drives with DOS SeaTools (Long Test).

Can someone help me ???

More info on these links:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?p=4989870#post4989870
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=168425&page=36

 

jurisgr, have you tried hdparm?

 

well, i wish i didnt have to.
WAF factor isnt high.

but given the field i work in, i rather not take chances to have lost images. speed and processing is one of those things to keep the art director happy especially when it's a hot and sunny day.

the only problem I have in my field is everyone expects someone of my level to use a mac. but I cant find any macbookpro that is remotely near a fully spec'd 8730W.

 

Thanks phil, i turned off power management for the drive and the clicking noise happens a lot less than before. But there is a paradox: the disk spins always and that creates a lot of vibration ...

Install osx86 on your HP ?

 

OSX86 is 3hrs on 8730W with internal and external 12cell battery. while vista is 8hrs. OSX is a battery hog on PC systems. it almost seems as if OSX86 cant understand HP ACPI.

 

I tried HD-Parm example commands - all of them return error because i use RAID0.
If I move to NON-RAID I lose half of disk performance

 

Big Thanks to Phil!
1) I disabled RAID on my system.
2) I booted with Hiren's Boot CD 9.9 (I added to image HDPARM before burning CD).
3) I used following commands:
-B set Advanced Power Management setting (1-255)
-M get/set acoustic management (0-254, 128: quiet, 254: fast) (EXPERIMENTAL)
At first time i used -B and -M commands for both disks to set value 254.
This solution didn't made desired result. There was clicking sounds a lot.
Then i set to both disks -B value to 255 and -M value to recommended - 208 - for both disks. I tried to set -M value to 200, but HdParm set it to 208.
Of course after each test i have to go to BIOS and set back to RAID0.

In a bit more than 1 month for first disk i got 7254 Load Cycle Counts (HD-Tune) and for second disk - 9805. In 4 hours i didn't hear any clicking sounds. And checked this SMART values for both disks - there was no change. I'll check after few more days these numbers and post it here.

I just hope that disabling Advanced Power Management will not kill my disks
I don't understand why this clicking is necessary for disks - so if laptop is on - everything should be on and no clicking, until i shut down laptop.

Second disk had in SMART values registered 52 degrees in Celsius as maximum temperature and second disk just 51. This laptop now is usually been used under 30C degrees in room. So i can presume that these disks are going to not be dead, because t junction is 60C. Usually this temp can be at an average 48C in my laptop.

 

I'm thinking of replacing my current 320GB 5400rpm HDD in my Sony SR with the Seagate 500GB 7200rpm... three questions:

1) How's the overall reliability of this Seagate drive?
2) How does it compare to a 320GB in terms of heat, noise & battery life?
3) Is it compatible with the Sony SR laptop?

Thanks!

 

1.) No problem
2.) It will depend on what 320GB drive you currently have.
3.) Yes

PS. Seagate's 7200.4 isn't a top notch performer and has a hard time staying in front of WD5000BEVT as you can see in these benchmarks.

 

Thanks Phil! I'll take a look into the Western Digital HDD as well.

 

Can anyone guess what might be the reason for the poor performance of my new 7200.4 160GB? Below is the result of HDtune



I'm getting similar results with HDTach and other benchmark tests as well:



My laptop is HP NX7400 (specs http://store.dovecomputers.com/index.php?app=gbu0&ns=prodshow&ref=RH410ET) and it had some Fujitsu 5400rpm drive which I cloned to my new 7200.4 using HDClone. The old drive was quite fragmented so I used Windows Disk Defragmenter and JKDefrag to defragment the drive before the cloning.

First I though that the problem might be that the motherboard only supports SATA150 so I set the jumper to the HDD for forced SATA150 mode. It did not have any effect to the performance. It remains poor.


EDIT: Nevermind, I ran some bencmarks in Safe Mode and got much better results. There must be some background service that is loading the HDD while in normal mode.

 

hey guys,i am intending to upgrade harddisk of my laptop hp dv5 1215-tx.which i use for net/movies/games,currently i have 160 gig maxtor
the 2 options for me are Seagate Momentus 7200.4
and wd 5000 bevt .....both 500gb
but the price difference is considerable,so will the performance difference be noticable to a user in 'real life terms' ,i mean there is a difference beteen info in benchmarks and what a 'human' will experience,so is Seagate Momentus 7200.4 worth extra 20~30% of price?
P.S. I am from pakistan,newegg rates wont be suitable for reference,rest assured price difference is 20~30% (segate being costlier)

 

No it's not worth it. In real life they perform the same. Get the WD. It uses less power, makes less noise and it's cheaper.

 

Does the Seagate 7200.4 500GB make that much noise?

 

Slightly more than WD5000BEVT and it isn't any faster.
http://techreport.com/articles.x/17010/1

 

Thanks, after reading this review,even if Segate costed the same, i would still have gone for Wd Scorpio blue.
If only they had also included WD scorpio black in this review!

 

nooo definetly noo
i had all wd's and they were hell noisy
my seagate is like ssd

 

did you have the newer version i.e WD5000BEVT thats under comparision with 7200.4 or older ones,because its likely that WD made a number of improvements in this model.

 

Well Evoss is banned for the time being so he can't answer.

But check the Mewegg customer reviews. Sometimes it's a bit noisy, often it's not.

The one Techreport had was actually very quiet:

 

slightly off topic,but hre is a comprehensive comparision of harddisk performance over the time:
http://techreport.com/articles.x/17183/12

conclusion of this article says "...Although the capacities of mechanical hard drives have snowballed, the performance gains have been considerably more modest. Higher areal densities have improved transfer rates, both in real-world file operations and in synthetic tests, but we're looking at roughly a two-fold increase in performance, at best..."

 

I just bought a 500gb 7200.4 for use in an external esata enclosure. Now, my laptop (dell xps 1340) has problems with esata at 3.0gbps, and so I need to jumper the drive to 1.5gbps. The manual for this drive, http://www.seagate.com/staticfiles/...ook/momentus/7200.4 (Holliday)/100534376a.pdf shows the jumper setting to limit the data transfer rate to 1.5gbps.

The problem is, when I jumper the drive in this way I still get 3.0gbps transfer mode (and so the drive readily hangs with my laptop). Any ideas what's wrong with this jumper setting?
I've verified with a voltmeter that the jumper is making proper contact across the two outer pins in the jumper block.

I have the newer firmware 0002SDM1 on this drive.

Don't tell me Seagate has removed this functionality. I just bought this drive specifically for this feature as my older western digital doesn't have a jumper for 1.5gbps operation.

 

i have one of these 7200.4 drives. Speed is good enough, but there's one problem, it sometimes makes click and chirp noise. Sometime its like once every min, and sometimes i dont hear it for like 10 mins. I dnt know if i should RMA it or not, it does get quite annoying. I haven't noticed any pattern, but its just click sound ,followed by a chirp noise for 1-2 secs. Is it normal for these drives?

thanks

 

Turns out the problem was that my external 2.5" enclosure somehow undoes the effect of the jumper. The host controller (intel ICH or nvidia) still saw the disk as 3.0gbps with the jumper in. Attaching the disk via esata without an enclosure (or with an enclosure that limits transfer speed to 1.5gbps anyways) fixes the problem.

I knew that some esata enclosures limited 3.0gbps disks to 1.5gbps but I didn't think the opposite was possible. (What an interoperability mess.)

The problem enclosure is the Rosewill rx81us-ht-25a-blk
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817182134

 

hi i have same click noise but it make 1 time or two times a day so it's not bothering me at all
probably head is reseting in some point ? ask seagate HQ's

 

I'm looking for the best-performing 2.5" HDD (can't afford an SSD ). Originally I thought that would be the 500gb 7200.4 due to its high speed and density. Apparently not though considering that the Scorpio Blue 500gb@5400rpm is apparently just as fast or faster. So my question is.. is the Scorpio Blue 500gb the fastest drive on the market or would that be a Scorpio Black 320gb or a different size Seagate 7200.4? Performance is my mine criteria when looking for a drive, but the 500gb would be nice as opposed to 320.

Ideas? Thanks

EDIT: Oh yea, I could also put a second drive in my MBP by taking out the Superdrive (I don't really need it). Should I consider a small SSD as a main drive and then a big HDD for storage? Thanks again

 

Scorpio Black 320GB is slightly faster than those two drives.

Laptopmag says the the Fujitsu MHZ2320BJ is the fastest 7,200 rpm hard drive they've tested.

 

How's the Fujitsu MHZ2320BJ's power consumption? Will there be a noticeable drop in my June 2009 edition MBP's battery life?

 

I'm not sure. Probably similar to WD3200BEKT.

In my experience the battery life difference will not exceed 10-20 minutes. And you'll get your work done faster.

 

Hm, well for the best overall hard drive (quiet, fast, etc) would you suggest I go for the Fujitsu MHZ2320BJ, the WD3200BEKT, or one of the 500gb drives?

That was my last question I promise

 

If you want quiet you're better off with the 5400rpm 500GB.
http://techreport.com/articles.x/17010/13

 

Does no one own the 250GB version of this drive ?,I spent hours reading through this thread and see many people asking about it,only one person posted results for it,but the screenshots are not there.....anybody else have one????

 

Is the fall sensor worth it to get it for a netbook over the 500gb WD Scorpio blue? As I'm a student, I'll be carrying it around and wonder if it is worth the extra $30. Does it increases the power consumption over the HDD already inside the acer 10in aspire one netbook?

Or should I consider a single platter 250gb HDD for the netbook and get an external HDD for storage? What is the adv of using a single platter?

 

Taken from here. http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=401257

 

How about throwing the dog a bone and posting some bench result's for your new 250GB single platter variant...please

 

I decline.

 

How's the single platter working for you right now?

 

It's beautiful, student_confused. Simply beautiful.

 

If you turn it off while carrying around there is no point in a free fall sensor.

If you insist on keeping it on, it would be good to have a sensor.

I would go with WD5000BEVT for a netbook, or the 250GB if you don't need the storage.