What Is The Fastest Laptop HDD?

I've been searching google for hours. I just purchased two Spinpoint F3's for my desktop due to the platter density and raw performance in RAID0. The problem is I want to upgrade my Macbook Pro 2009 with the best HDD money can buy, but the reviews and data seem weak. I can't find a good site that is CURRENT that reviews several drives and compares the I/O performance.

I'm tired of morons on the internet, I've read maybe 10 forums where someone is asking my same question and they reply with stuff like, "If its 7200rpm itll be faster than your 5400" and "Velociraptor, Hands Down", or the infamous "Just pay $700 for an SSD" ...

I don't want to explain why those people are idiots, but you get the idea.

What is the fastest 2.5" 9.5mm LAPTOP HDD money can buy, and link me to benchmarks to back up your statement.

Sorry for sounding rude, but I am irritated.

 

They claim this one http://www.techtree.com/India/Reviews/Seagate_Momentus_Fastest_Laptop_Hard_Drive/551-102478-632.html


But I dont know never owned one.

 

Nice results, much better than the Scorpio Blacks which everyone seems to love so much. The Seagate Momentus 500gb looks promising but this review is from May 2009, does anyone know if this is still currently the performance king?

 

Do you want just fast. Or, do you want it big too? There is a difference.

Fast: Scorpio Black 160GB single platter.

Biggest, Fastest mechanical HD: Hitachi 7K500.

OneCool, I've struggled with 4 of those Seagates you link to, and had to return them all. The Scorpio Blue (a 5400 RPM HD) beat it hands down in real world use.

OP, forget benchmarks and your off-putting attitude - refine your research skills and you'll know which is the fastest mechanical HD right now.

See:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=441674

For overview of my 7K500 upgrade threads.


See:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=446811

Read the whole thread; especially the discussion between Phil (mod) and I.

 

No!

hitachi 7K500 is the fastest one around
The first one is 7K500 and the other one is Seagate 7200.4 and the other one is the old seagate 7200.4 with clicking sound problem.

7K500



Seagte 7200.4


Seagte 7200.4
​

 

So are you more edging towards speed and capacity or just pure speed, and what is your budget? I am assuming one of those 500gb 7200rpm drives are close to $200 or so ($150 to $220ish after checking), and I am not an idiot by the way, but if your concerned with pure speed(in regards to the operating system), than the best route is an Intel SSD which is $100 or so more than those HDDs, not "$700".

Of course, though, if storage is also a primary concern for such a drive, than a SSD is probably not the best route as capactities are lower.

The one platter Scorpio may not have the highest capacity, but the one platter deal is the main advantage, the less platters the better, and as most notebook drives usually have 2 or more, this is a major advantage.

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...9&bop=And&ActiveSearchResult=True&Order=PRICE

Im dualbooting Windows 7 and Snow Leopard on my MBP. Id like nothing smaller than 250gb. SSD drives in that capacity are $600+. no way I could get away with a 60GB HDD even with one OS. I work on photoshop and play a few games in my spare time.

 

Is this the drive your talking about? Just searching for 7K500 gets me no results.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145275

 

exactly that one.
and try frys.com, it is 5 dolars cheaper after shipping cost.
http://www.frys.com/product/5966014?site=sr:SEARCH:MAIN_RSLT_PG

 

Nice. I can get it overnight for $120 total. Decent deals here.

Does anybody know anything about the new 320GB platter sizes that just came out, none of these are performing faster than the 250 gb platter sizes yet?

 

True, I wasn't sure of your capacity limit, but yes those ones are pretty expensive. To be honest I doubt there is going to massive differences between models. Get a 500gb dual platter drive and I think it would be very fast, even if it was 5400rpm. Thats 250gb per platter, which is a high data density than the 160gb single platter Scorpio. The Seagate I saw on newegg that had 32mb of cache as well as being 7200rpm 500gb, on paper, should be very quick. I didn't see it listing how many platters though.

Also, again on paper, the dual 320gb drive (640 dual platter), should be quicker. There are pretty much no reviews, except the on-site newegg ones. Seems the reviews from customers are generally positive, I would say give it a try, it would be pretty equal to the 7200rpm 500gb drives, because, as I said the data density makes up for the slower spinning speed some-what.

 

This is my Scorpio Black 7200 250 gig with about 60gigs of stuff plus Windows 7 64 bit.

 

Its not too bad i guess, my current hitachi 250gb gets 50Mbps average but I'm just hoping to push into the 90+ mark. The rear end of that result just looks bad.

 

narsnail,

not equal at all.

See this Tom's review about the 640GB Scorpio (dog slow):
See:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/640gb-mobile-hdd,2451.html


How slow? Slower than the Scorpio Blue 500GB I had - that was over 40% slower than the Hitachi 7K500 I am now running.


Why this discrepancy? Because the higher the platter density the lower the signal to noise ratio is for the heads and they effectively take longer to 'settle' to be able to reach and properly read the data they're supposed to.


See:
http://anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3691

 

Guys HDTune transfer rates don't mean a thing.

The 7200.4 beats the WD Black in HDtune, yet the Black is faster in real life.

Fastest 500GB: Hitachi 7K500
Fastest 320GB: WD Scorpio Black

The Scorpio Black will beat the 7K500 it in application launcing.

For meaningful reviews refer to Techreport.com

 

dunno, but ssds are the fastest you can buy.. and they are well below 700$ depending on your storage need.



compare this to some random hdd bench:



this ssd cost me around 250$. unlike any hdd, no matter how cheap it was and how it is the fastest hdd, will EVER give you a real "woah it's fast" experience.

an ssd cost more, but it will deliver so much more..

so, the random idiot who laughts at your hdds will shut up now

 

I too do not like HDtune because its just to damn buggy.Look at my screen up there -1% on CPU load

Now there is one thing I noticed that seems to help alot (well not a WHOLE lot but some IMO) with opening programs and such, that is installing Intels Matrix Storage Driver if you have a Intel chipset.

 

Well, I don't have any specific benchmarks to back it up, but I have the WD Black 160GB single platter and a friend has a 7200.4 320GB and we tested it once (HD tune and real life tests) and mine was faster in the real life tests. The 7200.4 edged out the WD just a tad in the HDtune. The 160GB Black (single platter) is simply the fastest HDD in real life usage I know.

 

http://techreport.com/articles.x/15079

http://techreport.com/articles.x/17010

Couple of good reviews there.

 

and it still is dog slow.. you're comparing percents, and consider spending big money on percental gains.

that is not worth the money. for 20$ maybe, yes. otherwise, $ spend per speed gained is very low.

 

I know SSD's are the best drive on the market due to the 0.1ms Access Times and high data transfer rates. Find me a SSD at least 250GB under $300 with those high transfer rates and I'll buy 5 of them right now.

Im looking for the fastest laptop Hard Disk Drive due to capacity and price.

 

how about saving yourself the money and not buy an incremental tiny upgrade for a lot of money, but save it for a big step for not-that-much-more money instead?

i mean, increasing your hdd by at most 5 - 10% and paying 100$ - 150$ for it, or increasing the speed of it by up to 100% (and depending on the use case more) for 3x the money..

that's 10x more for 3x the money, or around one third the cost for the gain.


which is, why i'd say, if you want to cut the BS, just don't get a new "just a bit better hdd". it's not worth it. for 30$, maybe.

 

A Scorpio Black can be more than twice as fast as an average 5400 rpm drive.
http://www.laptopmag.com/review/storage/intel-x25-m.aspx?page=6

For the people that don't want to upgrade to an SSD yet, it can be a sensible upgrade.

 

sure. if you really have a bad hdd in from the start, anything will be a gain

then again, to have something that dances around his desktop raid0 system, the only option would be an ssd

edit: and don't let us get started how a raid0 of ssd rocks in a desktop then again, i'm very happy with my gen2 intel now in the desktop, no need for that raid. my father will get it. he needs more raw write performance, i guess.. and the additional storage.

 

The Scorpio Blue, which the Scorpio Black is compared to in the review, is actually one of the faster 5400rpm hard drives around.

And please no more "but SSDs are faster" messages in this thread. The OP has made clear several times that he wants a traditional hard drive.

You've said three times now 'buy SSD, do not buy HDD' (in different words). That will be enough.

 

This my 250GB 5400RPM Hitachi, I'm quite pleased comparing my old 120GB.

 

I was pointed to the 7k500 for a very fast laptop drive with tons of capacity. I run virtual machines, so I need something bigger and much faster than my stock 160gb drive. I get my drive tomorrow, so I can just post my findings.

SSD would really be too small. My OCZ agility on my desktop is 120 gigs, and I payed imo too much for it, although I LOVE the speed which can justify the cost. The problem is that I have 50gb on that drive right now, no games installed. If I started to do VMs and games, I'd need another 120gb+ of solid state. That's getting into $700 and that's just too much.

 

Your actually talking about 6x more for SSD. Besides, my current drive gets 50-60mbps, 80-100mbps is a decent upgrade to me, especially if it means twice as much storage as I have now.

I'm going to grab the Hitachi 7k500 that Synthetickiller mentioned unless smeone can point out a mechanical HDD that is faster. Plenty of space to run VMWare Fusion on OSX as well as Windows 7. Will also provide plenty of storage for movies on the go, a few 7GB video games, and room to breath with much better performance than my current drive.

I'd love to pick up an SSD. But my laptop cost me $1400. I can't imagine buying a drive for $650 for it. Maybe I'll buy a couple 2-3 years from now for my desktop in RAID0?

 

good luck with your choice. hope it serves you well.

 

i agree.. if u want space and don't really worry about load times , Mechanical hard drives are good enough.. SSD's are just too expensive... For the fastest mechanical hard drive , 500GB Hitachi 7K500 is ur best bet.. just get it and close thread.

 

Interesting request, SysFailure0x5a.

If you are that concerned about performance an SSD is the only choice. The speed differences between the best HDDs are tiny. Irrelevant, really. The differences in performance among the best HDDs barely amount to a rounding error relative to best SSDs. Wait, the entire access and transfer rate performance of the best HDDs are barely rounding errors relative to the best SSDs.

Exaggeration? No. The best HDDs are doing great to hit 1 MB/sec for 4k transfers. That number is so small that no SSD tester would likely mention it if two SSDs differed by only 1MB/sec.

Speed costs money. How fast do you want to go?

 

My Raid setup gets about 250Mbps in my desktop, with a slow access time of about 13ms.

Imagine two 128 or 256GB SSD's RAID0 with an access time of 0.2MS at 400Mbps ;-)

Only problem is till take me about 2 years to save up for such a config LOL. I could just throw another Samsung F3 in and get about 300Mbps with 14ms access time...

I hope it serves me well too. this 7K500 drive benches twice as fast as my current 5400RPM drive.

Thanks everyone for your recommendations, never used this forum before but love to see it so active!!! I'll be back ;-)

 

my current access times are 0.065ms...

but yeah, hope it serves you well till the prices for ssd get down enough for you to get one.

 

Can I suggest that you look a little closer at the numbers? The "50-60mbps, 80-100mbps" numbers are for sequential transfers. If you want to "Cut the BS" then don't look at those numbers. The test data show that those don't count for much because they don't represent real-world loads. The HD Tune test is effectively BS, like testing car acceleration by driving off a cliff.

Get the 4k test numbers from CrystalDiskMark for those drives and you'll see that they are maybe in the 0.3MB/sec to 1.0MB/sec range. What you are proposing is like selling a Kia to buy a Ford Fiesta because you want to "cut the BS and buy the fastest car." It's your money though.

 

My 250MB/s loads a lot faster than my old Seagate 250gb (1 patter) with transfers of about 60-90..... It ran much better than my old PATA at 50MB/s. I purchased my Samsung F3's due to the $54.00 price mark, large storage size, fast sequential transfer of 250MB in RAID0, and large volume of recommendations from the community. It turned out to be a blazing deal.

For some reason getting data and recommendations for a laptop drive has been like pulling teeth until the helpfulness of this forum (thanks everyone). That is why i was saying, "cut the BS, where is the data?".

I'm simply asking for peoples opinions and data on Mechanical HDD's of which is the fastest/best deal to date, HDTune is one method. If you have a recommendation for another drive and some data to back it up I'd love to see it.

I never buy hardware without a recommendation and benchies to back it up.

Besides, this is a new drive im putting in it? Why would I possibly screw up and "upgrade" to a drive that is the same speed or slower than my current drive?! That would be nuts! I'm getting 500GB of storage space, twice the sequential read speed, and overall a great buy for about 1/6th the cost of a 250gb SSD. Besides, the cost is not much different than other drives ont he market in this capacity, if its the best in class, even if its just a little bit faster, why not buy it?

Sounds like a win to me.

 

Guys, the OP has mentioned several times he doesn't want an SSD, for his reasons. Please try to respect that.

Tilleroftheearth mentioned his WD5000bevt installed Vista more than twice as fast as his Seagate 7200.4.

Techreport posted some interesting benchmarks of the WD500bevt vs. Seagate 7200.4

http://techreport.com/articles.x/17010/7

And Hitachi 7K500 is expected to be faster than WD5000bevt. So the differences will be even bigger.

 

Nice, I'll post my install times and personal benchies of the 7K500 after I get the drive... Unless someone knows of a faster drive? LOL

..............

T61Dumb..

"This test writes 4KB in a completely random pattern over an 8GB space of the drive to simulate the sort of random writes that you'd see on an OS drive (even this is more stressful than a normal desktop user would see). I perform three concurrent IOs and run the test for 3 minutes. The results reported are in average MB/s over the entire time:"

Doesn't sound very real world to me. How about we test how long it takes to load Photoshop CS4, encode a 2GB movie, or copy a 12gb folder containing text files, jpg's, mp3's, movies, uncompressed ISO's, and a few zips and exe's? Maybe I'll post boot times of Windows XP SP3 under VMWare?

 

More posts with the topic "but SSDs are much faster" are considered off topic by the moderating team and will be deleted from this thread.

If you want to dicuss why SSDs are superior create another thread or use the existing SSD thread.

If you have nothing to say about what is the fastest traditional hard drive please do not post here.

 

My apologies. I saw the focus was on synthetic sequential tests, and was trying to emphasize that a buying decision based on bad data might not get the desired results. Sorry if I was too emphatic and went over the line. Please delete this and my earlier posts.

 

Thanks for that T61Dumb.

I think everyone here agrees that fast SSDs are much faster. However, some people still prefer getting 500GB for $100. Even though it will be slower, it's still good to do research about what drive to buy.

 

Don't worry about it, your points weren't useless LOL.

 

And now for something different.I've owned 4 different Hitachi laptop HDDs and a couple WDs so make of this what you will. Hitachis have a trademark woosh when they are running. WDs tend to be dead near silent but run a little warmer. Little things to think about. I don't know if the benchies will bear my observations out.

 

WD1600BEKT or Hitachi 7K320 (160gb)
Single platter drive solutions are faster.
My 7K320 (160gb single platter) outperformed my dual platter 7K500 in loading everything I threw at it

K-TRON

 

In that case the Hitachi 7K500 250GB single platter will be interesting. It's going for $58.

I'm looking forward to see some real life benchmarks.