hard drive for notebook PC - seeking advice

I'm seeking an internal hard drive (HD) to replace the recently-deceased HD in my notebook PC. I have several questions. Firstly, I'd appreciate your opinions on four HDs I am considering:

Hitachi Travelstar 2.5 Inch 500GB 7200RPM SATA II 16 MB Cache Internal Hard Drive 0S02858 (same as 7K500 [below] as per Hitachi representative) [$82 Amazon shipped; already bought for $74 shipped but haven't opened and easy to return in favor of another one] [warranty 3 years]

Hitachi Travelstar 7K500 HD20500 IDK/7K 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache 2.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Internal Notebook Hard Drive [$75 Newegg shipped] [warranty 3 years]

Western Digital Scorpio Black 500GB Model WD5000BEKT [$66 Amazon shipped] [warranty 5 years]

Samsung Spinpoint MP4 HM640JJ 640GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache 2.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Internal Notebook Hard Drive [$90 plus $6.29 shipping] [warranty 3 years]

Any strong preferences for one of these HDs? The Western Digital seems like the best buy of the four, but I'm interested in other opinions of these HDs, or even other HDs not listed.

Subsequently, on a related topic, several buyers posted reviews on Amazon.com that stated the Hitachi 0S02858 (1st one on list) had 490-500GB accessible space when installed and formatted--I understand that 500GB hard drives typically yield 460-480GB in accessible due to other functions occupying some of the space. Do the space claims for the Hitachi seem plausible? Why would the Hitachi HD provide so much more accessible space than most HDs? If the Hitachi 0S02858 provides close to the nominal amount in accessible space, does it imply anything about the quality or functional efficiency of the HD?

Thanks much for reading and any opinions and additional information.

 

The one I know and can recommend is this one:

Hitachi Travelstar 7K500 HD20500 IDK/7K 500GB

With a proper setup of the partitions, it can provide class leading results.

See:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/6827665-post84.html


In the same link above, you can see that the Seagate XT Hybrid is just above the Hitachi.

Don't let the small difference in the benchmarks fool you, it performs similarly to the Inferno (#8 in the SSD list, same link) with over 100 more 'points' (with often used programs and startup/shutdown).


As to the variable HD space - it depends on the O/S and/or Formatting options used to ready the drive for use. Under Windows NTFS the Hitachi and the XT I recommend both give ~465GB of usable capacity.

 

I'll avoid hitachi. Died after six months in my t400 with a lot of bad sector. only run few hours a day.

 

Hitachi drives stink. Period.

Go with the Western Digital. Avoid Seagate like the plague.

 

> Western Digital Scorpio Black 500GB Model WD5000BEKT [$66 Amazon shipped] [warranty 5 years]

That's the best deal by far. Get it.

Performance wise or quality wise you won't notice any differences.

PS. Every 500GB HDD has the same usable space.

 

As Phil said, unless you want the extra capacity of the Samsung, they're all pretty much comparable. Just go for the best deal, which in your posted cases would be the Scorpio Black. Or maybe you might want to look at this post that went up yesterday in the deals section.