What the? 5400rpm Samsung faster than 7200rpm Hitachi in my T42p

Happy holidays.

I bought a new Samsung HM080GC (5400rpm, 80GB) to be used in the Ultrabay. To my big surprise, it has better average performance than the 7200rpm Hitachi Here are the stats:

Samsung HM080GC (Ultrabay) -vs- Hitachi HTS721010G9AT00 (main)
Min 32.9 MB/s -vs- 23.6 MB/s
Max 64.8 MB/s -vs- 51.1 MB/s
Average 51.6 MB/s -vs- 39.8 MB/s
Access time: 17.8ms -vs- 16ms (negligible in everyday use?)
Burst Rate 67.7 MB/s -vs- 78.0 MB/s (negligible in everyday use?)

I thought that 7200rpm 100GB Hitachi is the absolute best in the 2,5" PATA-class (performance-wise)? At least that's why I spend more money on that last year.

How can this be? Is it because of the age (1 year for the Hitachi)? Or any sub-optimal settings? Is it because Windows is on the main drive (and the system clogs down the Hitachi)? Or is this newer generation 5400rpm indeed faster? Maybe I should consider replacing the Hitachi with a 160GB Samsung (which, with the bigger platter, is supposedly even faster?)...

Any thoughts on this?

 

Yes the last generation of 5400RPM laptop drives are as fast ass 7200 drives. But I though this only applied to 160, 200 and 250GB ones

 

The Hitachi is a 7k100, not a 7k200, so it is the previous generation. However, there's not a landslide difference between the two. The 7200 is 1/3 faster, and some of that will be negated by the generational changes in the drives, but there should still be at least a 10-20% improvement in performance.

Are you looking at vendor specs or benchmark (HDTune) numbers?

The transfer rates look better on the Hitachi site... make sure you factor in other things too, like Min/Max/Average seek time, as the 7200 should get to your data quicker than its 5400 equivalent.

 

I'm looking at HD tunes numbers. I forgot to mention, sorry.

HDtunes doesn't give me min/max access time, that one number seems to be the average.

>> The transfer rates look better on the Hitachi site

Yeah that's the reason I asked...