Which drive?

I currently have a Hitachi 120gb/5400 in my Thinkpad x61s (my HD Tune: http://forum.notebookreview.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=16021&d=1205173237)

Would the Hitachi 200gb/7200 be much faster - noticeably faster program load and execution (rather than just faster benchmarking)? Is there any other notebook HDD which would be even faster?

Tom's hardware: http://www23.tomshardware.com/storage25.html?modelx=33&model1=993&model2=841&chart=142

I'd like to buy a reasonably fast 64gb SSD at around $500, but fear they won't reach that price level for a while, so I'm trying to decide if I would see enough of a speed improvement that I should get a faster HDD now rather than waiting the 6 months or a year or however long it takes for SSD prices to drop.

Any thoughts on this would be appreciated.

 

Yes, you would notice a little difference in performance, I would think.

 

I think the performance difference will be pretty great. The 7K200 has higher rpms and higher data density.
Newegg has the 7K200 for $140 after rebate, so it actually has a decent price too.
SSD's are very expensive and actually not that fast.
The only decent ssd drives are the m-tron 7000 series, which get 115mb/sec.
The other ssd's are only slightly faster than the 7K200, and its not worth that extra cost for such a low size and low performance increase.

I think that the M-TRON disk will drop to about $1000 from $2800 by this time next year. It is stil going to be too expensive for most users.
Also by next year there should be faster laptop harddrives.

I think you will be safe buying the Hitachi 7K200, it will offer quite a large performance increase, and it wont put a huge hole in your wallet like an ssd will.

K-TRON

 

Yes i would have to agree with K-tron here. The only SSD's which are really "faster" than a good 7200rpm drive are the M-Tron, and they are ridicously expensive. I'd opt for the 200GB 7200rpm over one of the current SSD's. I'd probably wait 1-1½ (perhaps even 2 years) years before getting an SSD which could be considered a good value

 

Any views on the Seagate 7200 compared to the Hitachi (ignoring price)?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...010150380+1309722571+1035507776&name=7200+RPM

 

The seagate 7200.2 is near identical in speed to the Hitachi 7k200.
the seagate is much more expensive,
the hitachi 7k200 has been out for a while and many people are happy with them.
In general hitachi harddrive are faster than seagate harddrives. Seagate sacrifices performance for a slight decrease in noise. Hitachi is all about performance.
I know with the 7K100 series vs the 7200.1 seagates, the hitachi was about 7mb/sec faster.
The speed of the 200Gb seagate will be similar to the 160Gb seagate in the chart you posted in the first post.
The Hitachi harddrive is going to be faster.

Here is a HDTUNE result of the 200gb seagate:


For easy viewing, the Hitachi 7K200 hdtune result:


As you can see the Hitachi harddrive is better, and more cost effective.

K-TRON

 

How about noise and power consumption?

The Seagate HD Tune looks rather spiky.

 

K-Tron is spot on about the noise and speed of the Hitachi.

 

K-Tron mentions a slight increase in noise, although I'm not clear just how audible "slight" might be. I'm not finding any comment on heat. What am I missing? Also, how about power consumption?

 

Noise wise, in a silent room, the seagate would be barely audible, where as you can heard the hitachi, although, the difference is minimal. Power wise...I am not too sure myself.