Hitachi 7k200/160g or 7k320/320g for main drive?

I ordered a Hitachi 7k320 320gb drive from NewEgg. I'm trying to decide if I will use it for the main drive in my T400, or use it in the drive bay for development work and extra storage/backups.

What configuration would you use, if you had both drives, and why?

I've heard the 7k320 isn't quite as performant (as they say) as the 7k200.

- Tim

 

Just use the faster one as your main drive (reason: because you'll be loading most things from it?).

Do that HDTune thing and find out the speed of the drives (or search for the results on the forum/google)

 

The situation here is subjective to what you are doing; If you are a gamer and/or do encoding or anything that could be considered "hard disk intensive" you should use the 320GB as your main HD as it would be faster than the 160. However, if your like me and have a lot data to pack away such as back-ups, school work, and the like, then the 320GB would serve better as your back up ( assuming the 160GB would not suffice ).

 

Practical difference is probably none.

 

wait, you can have more than one HDD in the T400? dont tell me that the slot thing on the lower left takes HDDs, cause if it does, ****.

 

No, I think you have to pop out the DVD drive and pop in the HD Adapter with the drive in it... so you can have 2 HD's, or 1 HD and a DVD drive (or other bay device), but not both.

- Tim

 

I think there is a somewhat noticable difference. AFAIK the 160GB drives use one plattern while 320gb drives use two, making those drives somehow noticable snappier under some conditions. The performance difference is there.

Storagereview 7k 320gb, 200gb, 160gb heads up:
http://www.storagereview.com/php/be...&devID_0=365&devID_1=355&devID_2=339&devCnt=3

Recent 7k320 drives at Tomshardware:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/notebook-hard-drive,2006-12.html

 

7K320 is faster than 7K200/160GB. Both are two platter drives by the way.

If you notice the difference in real life is another question though. Without a benchmark tool or a stopwatch it will be hard.

I'd use the 7K320 as my system disk.

 

The 7K320 is a great disk in terms of performance and power consumption. Use it.

 

In this particular case the 320GB drive is probably faster because it uses denser platters (the head can read more data at once) compared to the 200GB/160GB drives. However, I believe your logic about a drive with two platters being faster than a drive with one is fundamentally flawed. All drives from the same family tend to behave the same.

I have two Hitachi 5k320 drives. One is a single platter 160GB drive that shipped with my x200 Tablet, the other is a dual platter 320GB drive that I bought aftermarket and put in my x200 Tablet (the 160GB is now in my PS3). Both drives have comparable performance characteristics because they have identical platter density and rotational speed. Conversely, the single platter 160GB 5k320 is faster (and quieter) than the two platter 160GB 5k250 that shipped with my x200 due to a higher platter density.

Unless there is some drive on the market that does some kind of internal RAID 0 where it stripes data across the platters and can read/write to both simultaneously (I have never heard of this), it is unlikely for a 2 platter drive to be faster than a 1 platter drive. However, the 2 platter drive will be very marginally heavier (8g in my case), louder, and more power hungry (although none of these are a good enough reason to avoid the capacity a 2 platter drive can give you).

 

You are right, that was indeed what I thought. I did a little research and indeed single platter drives can be faster for the reasons you've given.

However, from the reviews I've read in the past years I'm certain that many of the single-platter-drives of the same family showed slightly slower performance. Their lesser performance could maybe explained becuase of the green market (optimized for less power consumption and low noise when only 1 platter is used vs raw performance in the high-capacity drives).