pros/cons of 7200rpm HD?

My 7200 hitachi is only just slightly more noisy than the 4200 drive I replaced. My only complaint is sometimes while sitting idle it will make a "tick-tock" noise for a minute or so before stopping. A bit irritating, but ot particularly loud.

 

In my opinion, never buy an Hitachi for the quiet laptops (like X60). It's lousy 'tick-tock' is a big annoyance to my ears. I have just replaced it by the one from seagate.
Anybody like quiet laptop. Buy Seagate. That's it.

 

Upgrade that HDD to 7200!. i had used a 5.4 and windows started up slower. also when i had to open the start menu there was a slight lag compared to the 7.2k. with the 7.2k all went smooth and quick. even when the memory went low, i recall that the 5.4k was strugling. but the 7.2 ran and load a lot faster.

 

Have your cake and eat it too!!

Read the review here:

http://www.bigbruin.com/2007/momentus7200_1

This is the one I'll be getting when it's time to upgrade. My 80 GB 7200 RPM Seagate is fine for now so I'll just wait for the prices to come down a bit.

 

Where can I pick up a Seagate Momentus 120GB or 160GB 7200RPM HDD? I tried newegg and tigerdirect and it doens't seem like they have them yet. I only ever see them as options on new laptops (like the macbook pro). Is it possible to buy one standalone?

 

ComputerHQ has them although I am unsure of the reliability of the site:
http://www.computerhq.com/Seagate_1...203OTABE1-RK/hardware/partinfo-id-859098.html

All I did to find that was a Google Product search:
http://google.com/products?q=120gb+7200rpm+2.5%22&btnG=Search+Products

 

Odd description. It says the drive has a USB 2.0 interface? So I'm assuming it is an external 2.5 in a USB case. Sounds cheap. But is the drive SATA or ATA-6?

 

A 160GB 5400RPM drive should perform on par with a 120GB 7200RPM. You have to take platter density into consideration here. And there is a neat ratio when comparing a 120GB 7200RPM and 160GB 5400RPM drive. The platter on the 160GB HD is 33% more dense than the 120GB HD. Similarly the 120GB 7200RPM HD spins 33% faster. So go with a 160GB 5400 RPM drive, and you'll get similar performance and 40GB's more space. And save a bit of $!

 

So it would be safe to say that a 160gb 5400 drive would be more superior all around than a first generation 100gb 7200? I'm not sure which to order on my upcoming new lappy.............

 

No - the 7200RPM drive is going to have the faster seek time, always. You will get a faster response time with the 7200RPM drive although the 5400RPM drive won't be too far off. Rule of thumb - if you want capacity, go for a 5400RPM, and if you want speed, get the 7200RPM.

It is an odd description, hence I don't know how trustworthy the site is.

 

Okay, thanks Chaz. Since I seem to be running out of hd space with my current 120gb, I guess 160x2 (5400) would probably be smarter than 100x2 (7200).

Thanks again.

 

As Chaz said, access times are usually faster on a 7200RPM drive. When copying very large files, the 160GB 5400 drive has the potential to be slightly faster than the 100GB 7200RPM drive.

 

I've already m ade my decision by about the 7th page, but someone posted earlier a link to this that showed a seagate 5400 outperforming a hitachi 7200 in quite a few tests

here's an excerpt from the conclusion:In fact, given the performance we've seen today, I'd actually recommend a 5,400-RPM Momentus 5400.2 over a 7,200-RPM Travelstar 7K100 for most users.

 

Well, that doesn't take into account details such as how many platters, how many heads, etc. Some of the newer drives use the same platter config, but have short swept platters or less heads on smaller drives for less capacity.

 

Here is are 2 HDtunes that prove my point, and 120gb 7200gb (7200.2) and a 160gb Hitachi

 

My 250GB 5400rpm Samsung HM250JI can match the 7200rpm Seagate for media data transfer rate, but not access time.

John

 

What is the thickness of that beast? Is it one of the thicker or standard size 2.5" drives?

Also, no matter how good a samsung drive is it will never touch my laptop. The desktop series gave me way too much trouble (3 RMA's on a single drive) for me to ever trust them for data again.

 

Regarding gaming, is the performance hit of a 5400RPM only with loading times? I assume it would not affect FPS and so on?

(I'm comparing two drives of the same capacity here, e.g. a 120Gb 7200rpm versus 120Gb 5400rpm)

 

pros:
>its faster

cons:
>its more expensive
>possibly worse battery life
>possibly more heat
>not avalible in as large of a capacity

 

12 pages to debate 5400 vs. 7200 rpm drives? Am I missing something? This is like debating the merits of a 2.0 Ghz cpu vs. a 2.4 Ghz cpu. One's faster and one's slower. One consumes a little more power than the other. One produces a little more heat than the other. Case dismissed.

 

Would the speed of a 160GB (5400rpm) be similar to (or even faster than) a 100GB (7200rpm)?

I am having a hard time deciding which one to get for my next notebook...

 

http://www23.tomshardware.com/storage25.html

There are some comparisons. The fastest laptop hdd you can buy (by a long shot) is the Hitachi 7k200. Lots of capacity, faster than anything else on the market. I have two of them and am totally pleased. They only consume 800 mA which is only a hair more than most 5400 rpm drives.

 

dell currently offers the fastest notebook drive (160GB 7200rpm) in the market as an upgrade for 50$. I think its an upgrade that warrants itself despite heat and battery cost.

 

Hi,

I have both of these as USB externals. The 5600 is 120 gb, the 7200 is 100gb.

Does anyone have sugestions on which one to keep? A friend wants an upgrade and they have a PATA notebook, so I am tempted to give them the 7200PATA, I could alternatively give them the 5600 as an external. Either way I want to be left with the better one as an external drive.

When they are both plugged in the 7200rpm, definately seems a bit faster. The thing with the 5600rpm SATA is that I can get a SATA connector for the PCI slot and plug it in that way. Is it worth it?


Thanks,

RD

 

so....

If i were to get a laptop with a core2duo T7300, 8600m GT...

would it be more worth it to get a 7200rpm or a 5400rpm?

 

I would go for the 7200rpm. When i swapped my drive from 5600 to 7200rpm, my bench marks went up by nearly 20%, not to mention faster loading times. Hope that helps...

 

I am kind of starting to see why lots of people don't answer the posts, when they keep asking the same question.........

Look if you have a 100gb 7200rpm (you can get a 160gb 7200rpm, i just bought one last week in Ireland, so you can get them everywhere else....) and it has 70gb of crap on it, then it will likely be slower than a 160gb 5600rpm drive simply down to the amount of space still available on the drive.

Buy the faster drive on your next notebook, and try to keep data on the internal disk to a minimum. Do install things that need alot of applications like games. But store photos and videos on an external drive (perhaps a swapped out notebook drive as it will be nice and portable...)

I have a 160gb 7200rpm drive running with XPPro, Oblivion,Stalker and apps like Photoshop CS on it. All this accounts for 25 gb of the space,presently everything else is on an external drive.

With Aquamark3 (i know it is old, but it looks nice...) my benchmark score went up from about 53,000 to 70,000, an improvement of about 19% (I am writing this from memory so the figures are not 100% accurate, but the 19% is.)

This improvement was a mixture of removing crap from XPPro,reinstalling all my software from scratch and changing to the 7200rpm drive.

I had about 65gb of space used on my old 5600rpm 120gb drive, I now have a max of 30gb used on my new 7200 160gb drive.

Don't forget about loading times as well, especially for games, much faster with a 7200rpm drive. I know 'much faster' is a subjective term, but the point is the person using the notebook, is the person that actually notices, so when i say much faster i mean much faster, from my experience it appears 30-50% faster.

Hope this helps

 

hi devsk u said dell offers the fastest 160gb 7200rom hd.. what about the 120 gb 7200rpm one? are they the same with diff size only? cause if i get the 120 gb 7200 rpm over 160gb 5400 rpm theres no extra fee..

 

If you want benchmarks comparing dozens of 5400 and 7200 rpm 2.5 inch drives, check:

http://www23.tomshardware.com/storage25.html?modelx=33&model1=425&model2=414&chart=153

They compare i/o and various transfer rates in various scenarios, as well as power consumption. They do not compare noise.

In short, for a given size, 7200 rpm has a higher average read transfer, but some large 5400 rpm's have a higher average transfer rate than some small 7200 rpm's.

All 7200 rpm have a higher i/o performance in workstation scenarios, and all have shorter random access times.

Boot time is generally lower with 7200 rpm, but there are exceptions.

7200 rpm all have higher power consumption; so they probably run hotter and have a shorter battery life.

Fuzzy

 

Would you be interested getting this 200GB 7K200 drive for as little as $132?? Well, some of y'all are missing out on a great deal on the Hitachi 7k200 200 gig hard drive, and there's a thread in the deals section of NBR. Firstly, credit must go to Zetto who started the thread in the bargains section, and a personal thanks goes out to my brother (Anon00) who pushed me into getting off my lazy arse and go take advantage of this deal and from whom I'm stealing some wording to make this post.

The drive to look for is a 200GB, 2.5" external Hitachi drive. It comes in a clear plastic package with red at the top. Look for a serial number that begins with "DTG". As the picture below shows, the drive is a 7k200 drive.

Here's what my brother posted:

Before taking apart this drive, be sure to plug it into your USB drive first and check out the model number via Device Manager or HDTune. If the drive isn't what you were hoping for, the warranty is still intact, and you can return it to Best Buy without paying a restocking fee.

I've attached the HDTune results below. I don't believe the drive is fully optimized as I cannot explicitely enable write caching. I believe this has caused wide fluctuations in my HDTune results, so I'm only going to post my best results, but will post the questionable results upon request.

Here's my old hard drive. Keep that maximum 32.7 in mind.


This shows how I was initially able to enable write caching, but Vista later disabled it, which may be adversely affecting my HDTune results....to be continued...


Here's the most stable HDTune results from the new hard drive. My new minimum is almost exactly the same as my old maximum!!!


Here's the old Fujitsu hard drive out of my Fujitsu T4210 tablet pc. It's an 80 gigger, and I believe it's 5400 rpms.


This is the bottom of the Hitachi drive. It wasn't secured to the case and literally fell out when it was flipped over. You can see the SATA/USB bridge attached with two screws.


If you look closely, they look like they've already been stripped, but they are machined to prevent overtightening....nice touch eh?


After removing the screws, it slides right out.


It looks like a perfectly normal drive.


With perfectly normal SATA connectors.


And that Hitachi bridge hooks up perfectly to my old Fujitsu drive.


Which fits perfectly into the Hitachi external case. This should ameliorate any doubters about this drive being different in any way.


Here are the screws my brother mentioned. I know my thumb is beautiful, don't be hatin'!


My favorate pic.....I would've thought Hitachi would put screws under this sticker instead.


My brother used his Lenovo modular drive caddy to image my hard drive with Acronis. I'm not sure if the restored image failed because of something he did, or Acronis, but I'm pretty sure it's Acronis since it's failed me with Vista in the past. He's using Acronis 10.0.0.4942.


And thanks to Acronis failing me before, I knew to grab my Vista DVD and initiate a repair.


Once again, Vista quickly found the problem.


After I restarted, the device drivers were installed, I had to do one more reboot, and I was good to go. I won't claim to notice an improvement since I'm prone to the placebo effect, so I'll let the HDTune results posted above do the talking for me.

 

I've owned a...

Seagate 80GB 5400 RPM
Seagate 100GB 7200 RPM
Samsung 160GB 5400 RPM

In terms of regular everyday usage, I cannot tell a difference in speed.

In terms of heat, the Seagate 5400 RPM and the Samsung 160GB 5400 RPM idled at 45 C. The Seagate 7200 RPM idled at 53 C.

In terms of battery life, the 5400 RPM drives lasted about 10~15 mins longer than the 7200 RPM.

Benchmarks will show the 7200 RPM is faster. But can you feel the difference? No, I think any benefit you 'feel' is 100% psychological.

 

What About using a 160 gb 5400 rpm together with a 250 gb 7200 rpm? Any complications there?

Dell Vostro 1700.

 

difference between 5400 and 7200 is 13%...(from what I've been taught)
if that's worth the $, do it.....if not, you'll save cash.

 

That all depends on the specific drives in question and what kind of specific tests you're running. In certain areas like sequential file transfers and write speeds you likely won't notice much of a difference from like a 200GB 7200rpm and a 320gb 5400rpm. In access times however which are where you notice real world performance differences most often there is going to be more of a difference because regardless of other factors the 7200rpm is still spinning at a higher spindle speed and accessing files more quickly.

 

Aren't the 7200 Drives obviously louder?

 

Yup...but according to many users seagate is pretty quiet, where are hitachi is faster but alittle louder, hardly noticeable to me to be honest...unless the room is dead silent.

 

Please correct me if I am wrong...

5400 is 75% of 7200. If you are talking about an increase in rpm's 7200 is 1800 rpm's more than 5400. 33% of 5400 is 1800, wouldn't a 7200 rpm drive actually be 33% faster than a 5400 hdd?

 

Well, this only holds true if both drives are the same density. Since 5400 RPM drives can be much larger than 7200RPM, the performance levels between the 2 largest in their speed categories are actually pretty close. The WD Scorpio 320GB compared to the Hitachi 200GB 7200 RPM are very close in speed. Transfer speed wise, the Scorpio is faster, but access times the Hitachi is faster. But even still, it would be barely noticeable.

 

and 10000rpm drive is 39% faster than 7200rpm...I wish the speed would scale that way. Only access times become better, which may or may not result in a drive faster by 33% or 39%. Real world experience with all three tells me the difference is less than 10% between successive rpms.

 

I recently Upgraded from Hitache 160GB 5400rpm to 200GB 7200 rpm (Hitachi) and the difference was quite noticable.

reference:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=224334

 

3.4-3.1=0.3 => 9.6% increase in performance....still less than 10% that I mentioned....;-)

just kidding...we don't know anything about how MS rates the disks. And it can not be anything "real world" because it doesn't collect stats over a month of your real disk usage but only a small sample of synthetic benchmarks run over a minute or so.

 

Pros- Faster

Cons- more money, SLIGHTLY more viberation

-It is completely worth it though. And ive never seen a temp. difference between 5400 and 7200.Just speed.

 

Actually I really don't know how come the Aero Glass performance increase because of the hard drive upgrade.

The gaming performance of the system atleast had a remarkable boost. Call of Duty 4 runs smoothly. The Slow performance of FIFA 06 is also completely finished, now it runs without any lags.

reference:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=195832
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=195640

 

will this seagate work in my 8510-p ?
https://www.directdial.com/ST9200420AS.html

or should i go with the 160 7200 ?
https://www.directdial.com/ST9160823AS.html

will the 200gb be much faster ?

 

Actually, you should go for the Hitachi 7K200 series harddrives, they are faster than the seagate 7200rpm drives. They are about 5-7 mb/sec faster than seagates.

There will not much of a difference between the 160Gb and 200Gb drives. They use the same disks, the heads have just a more limited movement, so only 160Gb is seen rather than 200Gb.

K-TRON

 

I reviewed the same drive (I'd think)

http://glass-cap.com/Blog/index.php...mb-cache-sata-150-notebook-hard-drive-review/

shows the difference between my 5400rpm 160GB seagate and the 200GB 7200rpm hitachi

 

rather stck with seagate , 5 year warranty , and much less noise than the hittachi i want to replace .

 

i'd like to see the comparo , but i don't have the "privilage " required

 

Crap I'm an idiot. Every time I add a new category, I forget to add it to the anonymous user access list.

Should be good now. Sorry about that and THANKS for the heads up.

 

thanks , looks like i'll get the 200 gb drive , but it will br seagate as i've always had great luck with them , and i got a $200 credit at a store that does not carry hittachi hard drives . i sure can use the extra storage space , and the extra speed will help with all the video work i'm doing .
thanks , your report helped me make the decision