hard drive benchmarks: 160gb vs. 100gb 7200rpm

Hello. I'm new to the forum and as i was reading through this section, I found the "upcoming 10k RPM notebook HD?" thread.

I grabbed my 2 hitachi drives for a head to head comparison in popular benchmarks to dispel the rumors.

The drives are:
-Hitachi 7k100 100gb 7200RPM SATA
-Hitachi 5k160 160gb 5400RPM SATA

Results:
The 7200rpm drive showed a 10% improvement over the 5400rpm drive. This improvement is seen in average transfer and in access time. Despite the 10% difference, the 7200rpm seems much snappier than the 5k160.

Granted, I am very impressed with the performance of the 160gb drive since it approaches 7200rpm speeds and has more storage for about the same budget.

 

I'm pretty surprised about the performance of the 160gb drive, I thought the 7200rpm drive would be much faster. I guess the difference will be bigger, depending on what you're doing with it.

 

Sounds about right the higher density makes up for some of speed lost in rotation speed.

 

Definitely. It's a very impressive drive. It is significantly faster than an 80gb 5400rpm drive.

I hope people don't take this the wrong way and assume there is little difference between 5400rpm and 7200rpm. There IS little difference between a high density 5400 and a 7200rpm, but a BIG difference between these 2 and regular 5400 rpm drives.

I may go ahead and test an 80gb 5400rpm drive too.

 

Bear in mind actual usage vs numbers will of course vary - that may work in benefit of either drive. When I test my external through firewire vs USB, firewire is supposedly 33% faster. In reality i'm not so sure, it seems to lag more. Anyways, here are my 7k100 results results:

 

Maybe someone with a smaller 5400rpm drive can run an HD Tune and post a screenshot. Make sure to close active programs and disable the AV.

 

Have a look at the other thread reg 10k notebook drives. I have posted a graph with results from almost 100 drives.

 

I noticed looking at the drive labels that the 5400rpm draws 700ms and the 7200rpm draws 1.1amps!
I would love to see a comparison of 2 drives of the same capacity, formatted at 8k or 4k cluster size.

 

Tom's Hardware has a comprehensive set of charts for 2.5" HDDs. The measurements include maximum and idle power consumption. 7200RPM + SATA results in the highest power draw. In general, SATA seems to be bad news for energy conservation and battery life.

John

 

0.58 Amps for a 7200rpm 100gb Seagate Momentus.

As for speed just remember that Access Time makes the BIG difference between drives. Thats why even the older 7200 drives are faster than any 5400 drive.

 

Here you go, Seagate Momentus 5400.3 120gb with perpendicular writing.

 

that's pretty good, especially for the access time. Interestingly, there seems to be little difference between the 120 GB and 160 GB, indicating perhaps that the disk density plays a lower role than the perpendicular writing technology. Mind you, this would depend more on the amount of material currently on the HD, but still.

The new seagate SATA 7200.3 with perpendicular technology should be smoking!

 

I posted some results a while back comparing different drives in enclosures. One of them was an 80GB 5400 RPM. I will try to find it again.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=92632&highlight=hard+drive

Check that out for more test results. Has lots of drives to give comparisons.

 

The 160 GB 7200 drive - were both of those test in enclosures? Both were pretty slow.

 

Access time is normal. Transfer rate is not drive limited but enclosure/USB.

 

I thought USB 2.0 was rated faster? In any case I'm getting discouraged on the poor quality firewire chip sets showing up in greater numbers of laptops and drives. The Dell's seem to have flawed F.W. chips as well. I've had the best performance with TI chip sets.

 

Mine uses the profile 1530 mixed usb/FW and is good for USB, okay for firewire. Although USB has a slightly higher max transfer rate than FW 400, it tends to be less consistent and therefore generally has lower rates. Firewire serves okay for me, had a problem for a while that when first acessing the drive or after it had sat for a while (plugged in and on) it would take literally a full minute to wind up, and froze my laptop up while it did so. It just ate up all my ram, paging file sapce, and maxed out my CPU for a minute, then ran fine until allowed to sit for 10 min or more again. This effect disappeared, and now it allows drive access more or less instantly. No idea what changed.

 

I figured they must have been in enclosures, but it still seems a bit low to me. Even my 4200 rpm 2.5" in an external gets 19 mb/s avg transfer rates. My 3.5" external 7200 gets 36 mb/s USB, 40 mb/s with FW. Mind you, that is a faster drive with a fat 16mb cache, and an expensive enclosure.