Two 7200 VS Single 5400

Hi,

I have an option to buy either 160 Gb X 2, 7200 RPM hard drives or a single 320 Gb hard drive.

Is the gain from the 7200 RPM HD substantial? What is the effect of the spliting on the speed? And how much weight is added due to additional HD?

Thanks!

 

Actually the Single 320gb I believe would outperform the 160gb due to its high density.

On a side note which 320gb notebook hard drive would you guys recommend.

 

It depends on what 7200rpm and what 5400rpm drive you're talking about.

If you get a WD1600BEKT, which is a single platter 160GB 7200rpm drive, it will outperform any 320GB/5400rpm drive.

But older 160GB/7200 rpm drives with two platters will be out performed by a WD3200BEVT for example.

WD3200BEVT is very fast and also quiet, but it gets hot. For some people this is a problem for some people not at all. I would not mind in my notebook. It uses a bit more power too.

Hitachi 5K320 performs a little bit less, is also quiet and stays cool. It's power efficient.

Samsung HM320JI is a little bit slower than the Hitachi and also cool and quiet.

The Samsung may be interesting if you can get it for a good price. Otherwise I suggest the WD or Hitachi.

PS. All three of these drives are benchmarked in Tomshardware 2.5" charts.

 

Actually, I don't know the exact brand.
These are two options for the new HP dv7t model. Do you know the models that HP uses?
Also, how much weight is added by the additional hard drive?

 

I don't know which brand HP uses. In case you can not find out, I would recommend buying the cheapest drive from HP and then replacing it with a drive you pick yourself. This will be cheaper.

You can choose to sell the original hard drive or build it in a $10 enclosure and keep it as an external.

A 2.5" hard drive weighs about 110 grams.

 

Thanks I checked out the chart and I am having trouble trying to confirm which drive is which

http://www.bestgate.net/product.pht...t=MinimumPrice&p_type=1&mode=Simple&Parameter[3][]=7&

It is in japanese but names of the model are in english.

 

I'm not sure what you mean. The three drives are on this chart and are the numbers 1, 2 and 4 on the japanese link.

 

I'm getting this one since it's big, fast and low power consumption, http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=32100&vpn=MHZ2320BH&manufacture=Others
and $100.

 

I think they made a mistake on that website it's a 5400rpm drive according to Fujitsu:
http://www.fujitsu.com/global/services/computing/storage/hdd/mhdd/mhz2040bh-mhz2320bh.html

I have one of those in an external enclosure.

 

get a single 5400 rpm drive or a single 7200rpm drive. The Hp may have two harddrive bays, but it has a software based raid controller, if it even has a raid controller, so you will not see more than a 7% increase in performance by putting two drives in raid 0.
I am not sure if it has raid, but no hp notebook on the market has a hardware raid controller, so raid performance sucks.

The weight of a harddrive is about 150-200grams or so.
It is not that much weight, but if capacity is what you are looking for, would go with a single 320gb 5400 drive, cause it is still really fast, and you will have the ability later to put a second 320gb drive in their.

K-TRON

 

I'd go with 2 physical HDDs if possible, unless you need the other bay for something else.

Keep in mind, even if it's software RAID, using RAID or not, having 2 physical HDDs will have 2 spindles, which will always be better than 1 spindle. Think of it as 2 arms working together vs. 1 arm. Also, if you have one single HDD and that fails on you, then you lose everything.

Another thing is, what applications you will be using? Many applications, such as Photoshop, can take good performance gain by putting the scratch disk on a separated physical HDD. Other heavy 3D rendering software can also take advantage of a separated physical HDD. Your OS can also take advantage by placing the pagefile onto a separated HDD, there is no performance gain if you just put the pagefile on another partition within the same physical HDD.

So it really depends on your needs. If you think you will need the other bay for something else in the future, then go with a single HDD. If it's performance that you're after, then go with 2 HDDs.