Western Digital 750GB 9.5mm drive available now - WD7500BPVT

Should be an interesting drive. If anyone has benchmarks please post.

 

Now all we need is the 750GB and 7200 RPM, we probably would have an HDD that pushes the SATA I bandwidth limits.......

 

Honestly, sequential R/W speeds aren't that important. The most important speeds are the random R/W ones, and even SSDs cannot push the bandwidth limits of SATA/150.

 

Already talked about it a bit here.
I'm leaning towards the WD6400BPVT actually - more in my price range.

 

I already have 500GB 7K laptop hd. I think I am going to wait for 1TB 7K before I will upgrade. Both the capacity and the performance must be significant before I would shell out my money for an upgrade.

 

This would be a significant capacity upgrade for me. Doubling my storage for ~$110? SURE!
I'll probably chuck my existing hard drive into a USB enclosure too.

 

Is there any benchmark scores for this drive anywhere. The increased memory density should make it perform a little better then a standard 5400 rpm but I wonder how much slower it is then a 7200 rpm

 

You need to research SSD's a bit better, The newer C300's flood a SATA II. Intel's and the like with reads at 200+ MBS easilly would flood a SATA I. My way less dense 7k500 hits at 109 MBS.

Now theoretically random reads with seeks may not on average flood a SATA/150 but remember the 150 is peak too. Random reads of large files will commonly run into this "PEAK" and thereby have a performance degradation........

 

When I Googled yesterday I couldn't find any.

The WD6400bevt did not score too well, let's hope this one does better.

 

I'm also hoping for benchmarks.

I hope it's not too OT to note that you might have performance problems with these drives if your OS is Win XP, Linux, or OS X older than Leopard. To avoid issues, manual aligning of partitions is likely required on these OSs.

 

Anyone hear of any recent news about a drive GREATER than 500GB at 7200RPM speeds?

I'm trying to wait patiently for WD to release something

Thanks!

 

Not even close. 2TB 7200rpm 3.5" drives don't.

 

I've done my research. Please reread my message. You won't notice a difference in 150MB/s and 300MB/s sequential R/W speeds, it's why the Intel X25-M with 70MB/s sequential write has little difference versus any other ones with 200+MB/s sequential write.

 

well i doubt the becnhmarks are going to be good... when we went from 500GB scorpio blue to 640GB it became slower and this is bigger so it may be slower... i can't wait for mobile 750GB ,1TB 7200rpm drives...

 

While you may be right theoretically, when I tested the same Intel G2 ssd in SATA1 and SATA2 notebook, SATA2 allowed for much faster storage performance, hands down.

 

Interesting, how did you measure it was faster (benchmarks or O/S loading)? When I tested a Samsung MLC drive, I didn't notice any difference from SATA/150 and SATA/300.

 

Any one of the peaks below is above 150 MB/s Sata I...........

 

Those aren't transfer rates. Peak transfer rates even between the motherboard and the drive's on-board cache are going to be far slower than that.

 

There are probably few times you actually flood SATA/150 when loading an OS. So few you may not notice the few MS it is actually slowed down. But that wasn't my statement, it was a drive that maybe can flood the SATA I.

The post was not to enflame the OLD war as to if SATA II is really needed over SATA I. I am talking technical specifications as that is what the OP was originally stating, not real world experience but benchmarks!

See the original post below

 

Ok, how's this one? from http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=775&type=expert&pid=5

Edit; remember to there is overhead, SATA I will never truely achieve 150 MB/s......

Edit2; Also you need the interface extra bandwidth within the CONTROLER so you can achieve these rates. If you cut the controler bandwidth to the drive you cut into the drives actual available pipe slowing the real world throughput!

Edit3; sorry the numbers just don't lie (no matter how consequential or inconsequential they are), and please people back on topic as I am interested in this drive too.........

 

SATA I bandwidth is actually 1500Mb/s, so the roughly 150MB/s figure already takes into account overhead.

I'm not too sure what you mean in your Edit2. Can you explain?

Ok, I'm off by a MB or two, but that doesn't mean a 750GB 7200rpm laptop drive would be pushing the SATA I envelope any time soon. Laptop drives are only just over 2/3 of the way there for maximum transfer speeds, but almost always have a lot less cache than 3.5" drives so this peak speed is even less important than the minimal role it already plays.

 

the drive has to be told where to go and other overhead commands. Then there is redundancy where a parity is off and it has to read again. Remember the pathway is bi directional. You will never see a true 150 MBs output only.

Correct 109 MB/s is about 3/4 there as the 7K500. Figure 138 to 143 real world MBs out of SATA I (very rough figures I know).

Please people, if you want to argue this I'll be glad to in another thread but lets get back to topic and I appologize to the OP, I didn't mean for this to take this note on and I will not respond in this thread further to these questions...........

 

Let's get back on topic now: WD7500BPVT.

 

Still haven't found benchmarks. Weird for it to be available and no one out there is reviewing it........

Edit; some users are chiming in http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136546

 

Ok,

I have had this drive for about a week now - and I just ran atto bench to give you guys an idea on speed: it seems that this drive runs about 58-60mb/s read/write, vs 190mb/s write and 270mb/s read of my os drive, an intel x25-e ssd. Please note both of these drives are simultaneously running in my Dell Studio 1747 Quadcore Touch laptop, so that may slow them down a bit. I replaced my 640gb scorpio drive with the WD7500BPVT, but I can't locate my previous bench for it as a comparison. I also have a couple of the 1tb 12.5 scorpios in a thecus mininas - needless to say it doesn't tap into their potential. Hopefully applications load better off of this 750gb (I only install games/non-intense programs on it, but I haven't had a chance to really test it out yet.

I also run the Crucial RealSSD C300 256gb in my desktop - and it blows SataII capacity out of the water, about 360mb/s read; and beats out my intel x25-e in every metric - though the little intel still holds up pretty well - it is SLC afterall. I even had two of the RealSSD's installed in Raid0, and while a little faster (not quite 400mb/s - though that might have been due to the cheapo highpoint raid 6gbs card I was using), it didn't seem worth the extra cost to run two of them and take a reliability ding with the raid0. The Realssd's replaced a Velociraptor Raid0 array which just about saturated sataII capabilities. I also run 4 of the 1.5tb 7200rpm Seagates in raid 0+1 array as a data drive in the desktop, and it just about maxes-out sataII thresholds. Oh, I also had the RaptorX (Sata1 interface - the pretty see-thru drive that was the speed king of the day), and that saturated sata1 speeds - years ago.

Compared to previous gen drives, it really is amazing how much quieter and more power efficient these drives have become. (That RaptorX was a loud, hungry little devil, as well as the first 7200rpm laptop drive I bought).

 

@eithegreat: Could you run HD tune and Crystal against the HDD? while synthetics it could shed some light on expected performance..........

 

eithegreat, thanks for the info. Can you upload a HDTune benchmark screenshot?

edit: did not see TANware's post when I posted.

 

we posted too close together, aren't we both the eager little beavers.......

 

Hopefully this works... I never really used hdtune before, but seeing the temp I'm going to have to put my laptop on a cooling stand - or try swapping it to the rear bay and move the intel to the center bay...

 

Very nice, thanks so much..........

 

Crystal Diskmark is running now

 

Here you go...

 

Very nice as well. It looks like the platter density gives it an edge over the 500 GB WD Blue. Doesn't look like a 7K500 beater but a great secondary drive storage option......

 

Thanks for the benchmarks!

I do expect the WD5000bevt to be slightly faster in real life. 19.9ms access must be causing some delays.

 

That seems a bit high to me as well, but isn't the 500 GB Blue like 18 something?

 

@eithegreat: The temperature of the drive seems abnormally high... can you feel noticeable heat near the hard drive?

 

I thought 17 but even 18 would be 10% faster. And as you know access times have quite an impact on real life performance.

 

I could feel a little heat - but less than with heavy use of the 640 scorpio. I think it's b/c my middle bay has no airflow and is completely enclosed in plastic - it sure didn't feel like 56C though - could be a software issue... I don't think my chassis fan ever kicked on either. And I was running the benchmark from my bed - so absolutely no air was going under my laptop. Wish I could offer more info. about my personal real-life observations with the drive - I've just been too busy to sit down with it - and I only had the 640gb scorpio for about a week before this one was announced to make a fair comparison.

I mainly wanted as much space as possible - it's a real pain to drag around the thecus, I like to keep it for mirror backups only. For my use the WD7500BPVT is the best alternative right now, it effectively yields 100gb more space than the 640gb version - hopefully it is actually 10%faster, but if it isn't it isn't like I have an option for a couple of months and those drives may not perform any better... BTW, with both drives and the touchscreen on high brightness, active deskscapes, active antivirus, multiple programs, mult. gadgets, etc; my battery life is 4+hours - while playing media from the drive - I doubt the 7.2k's can allow that.

 

Samsung just announced a 640GB 7200rpm drive with standard 9,5mm height and 16MB cache.
I opened a new thread yesterday:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=474149

 

Yes, I'm sick of watching access times get higher and higher, 20ms....no thanks, I already have a 5400.6 with 24ms and crap IOPS thats as slow as molasses in use despite having ok transfer rates, I guess transfer rates are more important if the drives is only used for storage, but still, it's a disturbing trend that doesn't seem to happen on desktop drives as capacity increases.

 

True, I am wondering to get the higher data density on the platters if they then also get closer to the outside edge with the heads and towards the inside diameter with the heads as well? This would increase the usable area for data storage but also increase the total distance the heads can travel thereby increasing average seek times…….

Edit; it could also be the narrower steps between tracks thereby increasing the number of tracks. If travel time of the heads is then measured in constant tracks per ms this could increase it as well.........

 

Review http://www.storagereview.com/western_digital_scorpio_blue_review_750gb_wd7500bpvt

Only synthetic tests though, no real world performance.

 

Im particularly interested in that Winbond cache module which is actually either 32MB or 256MB according to the Winbond site. Not a 8MB module as stated by Western Digital.

 

No matter if this drive has a 32MB or a 256MB cache - if anyone uses this for an O/S drive, they will be surely disappointed in the performance.

Pretty telling that the 640GB model (WD) is better - and that one is dog slow compared to even a Scorpio Blue 500GB model.

If I had a dual HD capable notebook - I might be tempted to use as strictly a data drive, but as a single drive where the O/S must perform on it - I'll pass.