Choosing hard drive: heat, noise, performance.

//Dedicated to HP L2000 fan cyclic //on/off thread.


Here's a short comparison of four hard drives I tested in my notebook (zv5000z) recently.

===Seagate ST93015A 4200 rpm 30GB
===Samsung spinpoint MP0804H 5400 rpm 80G
===Hitachi 5K80 5400 rpm 40GB
===Hitachi 5K100 HTS541080G9AT00 80GB

Seagate: normally runs at 33-34 oC, which is the *best thermal performance* I've seen for any hard drive. It is quite fast, but makes such a loud noise during data access that you never need to look at the HDD light to guess that HD is being accessed.

Samsung: when I installed this one, I was surprised to hear nothing. Quiet access and quiet read. Unless you check HDD light, you have no way of guessing whether HDD is idle or accessed. But the drive heats up to 42-45 oC during normal use. A huge 10 oC temperature increase makes zv5000z bottom quite warm, which I didn't like at all. The battery life decreased by 20-30 minutes in comparison with the Seagate. Performance of the Samsung spinpoint is better than that of the 4200 rpm Seagate, but the gain is not easily noticeable. Nothing major happened to file opening/writing in comparison with the 4200 rpm Seagate. I remember only one area where I could clearly see that Samsung was faster than the 4200rpm Seagate: with Samsung, Windows XP pro reproducibly shuts down in ...7 seconds! That is, from pressing the "Turn OFF" button to seeing black screen.
P.S. strangely, but my USB Microsoft mouse didn't like this hard drive. zv5000z would lose USB connection with the mouse every now and I then would have to re-plug the mouse. No fix found. And that was VERY annoying and would repeat itself over months. Many people reported Microsoft mouse going crazy sometimes, but nobody linked it to anything specific. Well, looks like having certain HD could make USB mice seek. My other mouse (not by Microsoft) was healthy even with the Samsung HD.

Hitachi 5K80: 36 oC is the normal use temperature. The drive runs much quieter than the Seagate, but not quite like the Samsung hard drive - you can hear the head accessing the disc. Unlike Samsung, Hitachi clearly makes Windows faster. From program opening to file browsing, everything is "more instantaneous". Of course, we are not talking about huge improvement over 4200rpm (in fact, 4200rpm Seagate drive feels quite fast too), but you will definitely experience the difference.
From reading reviews I noticed that people report HD failure with Hitachi 5K80 more frequently than with other drives, which hardly speaks in favor of the Hitachi 5K80 series.

Now, Hitachi 80G 5K100 drive (claimed to be as energy efficient as 4200 rpm drives). This is one of the recent additions by Hitachi. First impression was that the drive is unexpectedly quiet. 5K100 sonic performance is close to that of the legendary Samsung spinpoint drives, but in a quite room you can hear data access or write. In a louder room you need to check the light to know what 5K100 is doing. (It is interesting that you can "feel" Hitachi more readily than hear. When the drive is being accessed, no sound is emitted, but you can feel vibration with you fingertips, if you touch the notebook. I haven't seen anything like that before.). Temperature of this drive is 37-38 oC and is lower than that of the Samsung spinpoint drive. Notebook feels colder and this is a significant plus. Another advantage: Windows interface and program opening is faster than with Samsung spinpoint. It was hard to see the difference in performance between the Seagate 4200rpm and Samsung 5400rpm drives, but it is not as hard to see the difference between the Samsung 5400rpm drive and Hitachi 5400rpm drive. Very unexpectedly, Windows needs more time to shut down with Hitachi: 10 seconds vs. 7 seconds of Samsung spinpoint!

The overall winner between the hard drives seems to be the Hitachi5K100. It is very quiet (nearly as good as the Samsung spinpoint, which is dead-silent even during disc access), and it is faster than all other drives I've tested. The fact that it uses 2 discs (40GBx2) makes temperature quite high (37-38 oC), but still, lower than that of Samsung 80 GB drive.

If you need the ultimate drive, *look for a single-disc drive*, i.e., 40 GB 5K100. It should have all the advantage of the 80GB drive, but run a few degrees colder.

 

my two cents:

I've must have owned several dozen HDs over the past five years. Here's my assessment:

I look at bottom line reliability. in that measure, the best, in rank order:

1.) Seagate - mostly what I buy. Has all three: cheap, fast, and reliable (not to mention great warranty). Never had a dead one yet.

2.) Hitachi - Decent drives; I like their high rpm ones for performance. Good reliability; only a few dead ones.

3.) Fujitsu - Mediocre. Failure rate pretty high relative to other brands. Lots of dead ones, right after warranty expiration.

4.) Toshiba - wonderful, except they burn out faster than a crackwhore on a 3 day binge. Add to that pathetic warranty service, and you have a first class loser. I never buy these anymore, and if I get a laptop with one, it's pulled immediately and eBayed.

Heat and noise are subjective to me. I could care less as long as the drive lives. Although some drives do get hot, it's more a factor of their enclosure (be it internal or external).

 

What about Western Digital?

 

I think WD and seagate have merged