Fastest Notebook HD is coming!!! Hitachi 7K200

[stylinexpat]

This new 200GB HDD is going to be really nice. Was surprised Dell offered it before IBM did. I look forward to having one of these HDD

[Oaklodge]

I doubt that we will see the 7K200 in the shops for at least 3 months if not more ...

[tomh009]

22% speed increase presumably represents a best case scenario for certain aspects of disk performance, at least according to Hitachi, who has every reason to seize upon the most tantalizing number in their pre-product launch publicity. From the standpoint of most actual users doing the sorts of things that most actual users do, I doubt that the SYSTEM speed increase resulting from an upgrade of a 7K60 or 7K100, to a 7K200, will be worth either the price or the effort, unless there are other needed benefits, such as for the user who seriously needs extra hard disk capacity in their notebook(s).

The sustained throughput of a 7K200 is 39.7% higher than that of the 7K100, which has been the benchmark in performance until very recently. Not a yawn in my books!

Now, ws it worth upgrading from a 7K100 to a 7K200 for just the performance increment? Probably not for most people. But it surely is worth considering the 7K200 instead of whatever disk was your default choice until now.

[gator]

Now, ws it worth upgrading from a 7K100 to a 7K200 for just the performance increment? Probably not for most people. But it surely is worth considering the 7K200 instead of whatever disk was your default choice until now.

Bulls-aye!

[Ken Fox]

I know for a FACT that this will GREATLY increase my ability to load virtual machines (XP Pro SP2) from the disk and the like in VMWare and I look forward to waiting on my machine less and getting more done.


And besides, this thread isn't directed at MOST users. If you are happy with your current performance and don't want more, I kindly request that you stop discouraging others from pursuing it.

The FACT remains. THESE DRIVES ARE FAST. And SIGNIFICANTLY faster than ANYTHING ELSE out there. PERIOD.

lower the volume a little; we are talking about hard drives, not your significant other

You sound more like a salesman hawking a new car rather than someone rationally discussing computer hardware.

[Ken Fox]

Ken, whatever your points regarding need and performance, having a high-speed 200 GB HDD beats lugging a seperate USB HDD around. This 7k200 is drool-worthy just for that.

I had a 7k60 on my X31 (thanks to Brent!) and it ran hotter and noiser than the 7k100 on my T60. I am not a nitpick, but the difference was not something I could ignore. I think the 7k100 was (and still is) a great product. I bet the 7k200 is going to be even better.

I like my 7K100s; all 5 (now 6) of them. I guess it all depends on what you put onto your NOTEBOOK hard drive, assuming for the moment that maybe (as for many) your notebook is not the ultimate repository for all things about you. And, forgetting for the moment, that the T series has the capacity to have another hard drive in the ultrabay were someone really serious about storage. And, a 160gb 2.5" hard drive in a 2.5" external enclosure would not meet my definition of something I have to "lug." When I was in France for the last month I took a spare 7K100 in an enclosure, loaded with a ghost copy of my primary drive, just in case I had a hard drive failure. The few ounces and cubic inches that this took up in my carryon was not even noticeable.

100gb is a lot of space. It only looks like a little bit of space in light of the gargantuan desktop drives now being sold for next to nothing. Even with those, one has to ask the question of whether a typical computer user has 500gb of "stuff" they need to store, all on one hard drive.

A lot of the discussions in any enthusiast group are going to be about the sort of stuff the average intelligent person would just shake his head on hearing. This is a good example of that.

[Ken Fox]

Now, ws it worth upgrading from a 7K100 to a 7K200 for just the performance increment? Probably not for most people. But it surely is worth considering the 7K200 instead of whatever disk was your default choice until now.

can't argue with that, and over time the 7K200 will replace the 7K100, and the 7K200 will ultimately, itself, be replaced. In a few years, hard disks with spinning platters will probably be viewed much like Zip Drives are now.

[gator]

You raise a variety of valid points. The data on the drive is probably more important than the drive itself for business users ... but even many of them use thier laptops as thier only machines (which means they will like to store some personal and entertainment stuff the laptop). 100 GB is a lot of space ... probably much more than what people normally want, but once you get a large drive, you tend to put in more stuff. Call it the curse of the technpohile, more HDD/memory is always welcome (esp at a lesser cost!).

While I do agree that a USB HDD is not much of a weight to carry around (pardon my use of the word 'lug'), but, if given an option, it is something most will like to do without. A USB drive has its advantages - the primary one being able to be used at different computers; but it does not make sense to have one if you are going to be using only ONE computer (your laptop, for example). It is one accesory less to remember carrying and taking care of, esp. when you can get a higher capacity drive.

I do agree that dumping everything onto a single drive is a risk, but that's a risk that many will be willing to take.

ps: yaay! post no. 1000!

[Kyocera]

I honestly believe that the amount of system performance available now is more than adequate for all the things I ask my computers to do, and I do more things with my computers than do most people.

That is great for you.... brent was merely bringing attention to the usership in the forum that a new HD is out on the market that many of us may or may not be interested in, I don't think he is trying to sell them or shove them down our throats, we can pretty much discern wether or not it will be useful for our needs or not.

[Ken Fox]

I honestly believe that the amount of system performance available now is more than adequate for all the things I ask my computers to do, and I do more things with my computers than do most people.

That is great for you.... brent was merely bringing attention to the usership in the forum that a new HD is out on the market that many of us may or may not be interested in, I don't think he is trying to sell them or shove them down our throats, we can pretty much discern wether or not it will be useful for our needs or not.

Look, I hope the thing works well and offers a real benefit. Rather than selecting out one or two of the sentences in my "too long" post, as others did earlier, if people would simply read the post in its entirety they would see that I'm trying to temper the enthusiasm with a little dose of reality. In addition, I'm pointing out that whatever hardware benefits the manufacturers give us, the software writers are all at work trying to eat up with their bloatware.

That's all.

[Kyocera]

Look, I hope the thing works well and offers a real benefit. Rather than selecting out one or two of the sentences in my "too long" post, as others did earlier, if people would simply read the post in its entirety they would see that I'm trying to temper the enthusiasm with a little dose of reality. In addition, I'm pointing out that whatever hardware benefits the manufacturers give us, the software writers are all at work trying to eat up with their bloatware.

That's all.

Your're attitude is showing, why not temper that a little. We're not dummies here, we can read post's and...... read into post's.

That's all.

If you want to argue with me take it off line with the PM button.

[brentpresley]

That is great for you.... brent was merely bringing attention to the usership in the forum that a new HD is out on the market that many of us may or may not be interested in, I don't think he is trying to sell them or shove them down our throats, we can pretty much discern wether or not it will be useful for our needs or not.

Look, I hope the thing works well and offers a real benefit. Rather than selecting out one or two of the sentences in my "too long" post, as others did earlier, if people would simply read the post in its entirety they would see that I'm trying to temper the enthusiasm with a little dose of reality. In addition, I'm pointing out that whatever hardware benefits the manufacturers give us, the software writers are all at work trying to eat up with their bloatware.

That's all.

And this assertion is just FLAT OUT WRONG.

Currently, and for the past 15 years or more, hard drives are the limiting factor for speed/responsiveness in PCs. ANYTHING that is done to speed up the transfer rate on current hard drives has both a DIRECT and PROPORTIONAL impact on system performance.

The 7K200 is the first hitachi drive to utilize perpendicular recording technology. This allows for a platter density of 100GB per platter, effectively DOUBLE that of the 7K100.

This is no small accomplishment. In fact it is a much more significant step than we saw going from the 7K60 to 7K100 series.



The ONLY thing that would be more impressive in the storage realm would be a SSD. And right now, the transfer rates on those SUCK (approximately 1/3 of what this drive will do). Some of that loss is made up by the insane 0.05-0.1ms access times that are inherent to Nand memory, but not nearly enough.

[JHEM]

ps: yaay! post no. 1000!

Congrats Sri!

James

[taob]

And this assertion is just FLAT OUT WRONG.

No, it's not. I'm with Ken here... let's stick with facts and figures, and try not to hype things too much. I know we're all very excited when a new hard drive model comes out.

ANYTHING that is done to speed up the transfer rate on current hard drives has both a DIRECT and PROPORTIONAL impact on system performance.

I'm hoping most readers in this forum will know that the real situation isn't as simplistic as you describe. I can think of plenty of common scenarios where HD performance is not the bottleneck, and therefore rising HD transfer rates and falling HD access times will not have a significant effect on overall system performance. I'm pretty sure, for example, that my SETI@Home benchmark won't run any faster with a 7K200 replacing my 7K100.

Nothing beats real world experience, and certainly not claims made by a vendor in a product launch press release. I would personally be interested to see how much of a difference a 7K200 will have over a 7K100 as, say, a Photoshop scratch disk or when doing raw image conversions.

For now, I will play the conservative and say that I likely will not replace my 7K100 with a 7K200 purely for transfer rate and access times. Capacity, OTOH, is a different story. I definitely could use 200GB in one drive bay instead of the 2 x 100GB I have now. And if the drive also happens to be faster, bonus!

[gator]

Congrats Sri!

Thanks James ... really nice to have the feather!

[berlin]

Wow I can't even fill my 80gb hd. and I guess most don't bother with desktops. I synch everything with my desktop since they're more reliable than laptops. I'd hate to have everything in a laptop hard drive and lose access when it goes down.

[RealBlackStuff]

My main desktop has 160GB (2x 80GB disks). Together they store perhaps 45GB worth of regular files and another 15GB of drive-images.

Both my TPs have a 40GB HD with each at the most 15GB data.
I'm certainly not space-hungry.

But after reading the above posts, I'm just wondering if I should open up an Online Gunshop, where arguers can buy an AK-47 or a rocket launcher to blast opponents into never-never land?

C'mon guys, it's only a piece of hardware!
Don't get your knickers in a twist over a hard disk!

[summa]

Very nice! For us, the encryption piece is key. No OS dependencies and (if previous Hitachi announcements are correct), virtually no performance hit.

Seagate beat Hitachi to the market with encrypted hard disks and there are others out there also. But Hitachi promised to be first with a 7200rpm encrypted drive, and they've done it. I didn't expect this news until Q3.

The devil will be in the details -- how does this work with the BIOS (no industry standards for this yet), is there a key escrow or other mechanism for lost/forgotten keys, etc. But for us, this looks very promising.

[kay.one]

the 10,000 rpm notebook hard disk?

That will never happen. Too much power and heat to run in a notebook.

This is a 7200RPM, but with a MUCH higher platter density and possibly a bigger cache.

Why people never learn not to say "never" when talking about computer stuff.

[Brad]

Very nice indeed. Progress...

What are the SATA challenged ThinkPad users going to get?

Brad

[Patrick B]

Wow I can't even fill my 80gb hd. and I guess most don't bother with desktops. I synch everything with my desktop since they're more reliable than laptops. I'd hate to have everything in a laptop hard drive and lose access when it goes down.

I'd come it this from the other side, however. I currently have a NAS box on my network at home, with roughly 700 GB of space on it (about 50% used). My NAS box is for sharing files (media) between my two laptops, and for weekly backups of both my laptops (A Dell XPS M1710 and my T60p).

On top of that, I have two hard drives in my T60p (160 GB primary and 100 GB secondary). I very rarely use a CD-ROM / DVD-ROM, but I happen to have a desktop unit connected via USB to my docking station.

Of the two drives on my T60p, I probably have about 110 GB free. So yes, I could in theory stick everything onto the single 160 GB drive, but I'd have less than 10% free space on it.

I travel extensively overseas for work, and I HATE carrying CDs / DVDs with me. If I can grab the ISO image instead, and run it off my second HDD, then it's both faster for me, and less stuff to carry.

So yeah, a 200 GB, 7200 RPM drive excites me. I could drop down to a single drive in my T60p, and gain performance to boot (160 GB drive is currently 5400 RPM).

Same thing with my Dell; two 160 GB/5400 RPM drives in it, and the docking station has a Firewire DVD-RAM drive connected to it. If I need to load something via CD / DVD, I just pop out the drive, stick in the DVD-RW, do it's thing, and stick the HDD back in. Same idea in terms of space though; when you're lugging a laptop (either the T60p OR the Dell) through an airport, the less stuff to carry, the better. It doesn't matter if it's CDs, DVDs, USB HDD etc; going from one end of Changi Airport in Singapore to the other with 10-15lbs on your shoulder is long....

All I'm saying with my endless babbling is that some of us ARE space hogs, and keep all (or much) of our data and lives on the laptop(s). As I said, it's all backed up at home, but when I'm 10,000 miles away from home, having that extra 100 GB of space may well maintain my sanity (or may mean I have the code that customers require).

From my perspective, there is no such thing as too much space. If I can have space AND performance, then I'm even happier.

So where can I buy a 7K200?


Patrick

[Bing0]

Ultimately, those who want to tone down some of the excitement surrounding the release of this drive will look for and inevitably, find valid points to do so.

I am however, fully persuaded that this is a major advance in improving laptop performance. 200GB of space on a drive this size, this fast is phenomenal.

When I click on an .exe file and a large application snaps open quickly, ... I get a warm fuzzy feeling.

[berlin]

i got me a 2.5 seagate sata momentus 7200 80gb drive from ebay for $62. not sure if this is a good deal.

yesterday, I added a 2gb stick for a total of 3gb ram but with a 5400rpm drive, there was little improvement.

with the 7200 rpm drive, it's noticeably fast. but it's a bit loud and yeah it vibrates a little. ...been using it for 1.5 hours as I post. it doesn't heat up that much.

i'm downloading all the other X60s drivers and then I'll decide if I should sell my 100gb or not.

[beeblebrox]

After 20 years myself in this business I can assure you that:

a.) you never have the latest, best, greatest product, because the next generation which blows your great product away, is in the labs ready to be introduced soon, at a better performance and lower price point. Todays high-end is always tommorrows piss-poor low-end (e.g. graphics cards).

b.) there is no use of discussing which manufacturer has the greatest technology ever, because the competitors immediately dissect the newest competing products to see what is going on and how to beat it. Better products have a time window of a few months before they are copied (e.g. disk drives)

c.) there is never something such as too much memory or too fast and too powerful, because someone always comes along who immediately neutralizes that advantage (e.g. Vista anyone?)

d.) the uninformed consumer always exploits a system to the limit, regardless of its size (e.g. internet bandwidth, huge disk drives (filled quickly with pr0n movies and TV shows)). A hard drive always has two stable states: New and Full, regardless of its size.

see, Hitachi introduced a 250GB drive, Fujitsu has a 300GB drive and announced a breaktrough of 500% capacity. I assume within 18 months we will have 3Ghz notebooks with 3GB Ram and 500GB hard drives at the local electronic discounter. And they will just be able to run a smooth Vista SP1

[carbon_unit]

How True!

[Kyocera]

How True!

Seconded.

[gator]

... Todays high-end is always tommorrows piss-poor low-end (e.g. graphics cards).

c.) there is never something such as too much memory or too fast and too powerful, because someone always comes along who immediately neutralizes that advantage (e.g. Vista anyone?)

d.) the uninformed consumer always exploits a system to the limit, regardless of its size (e.g. internet bandwidth, huge disk drives (filled quickly with pr0n movies and TV shows)). A hard drive always has two stable states: New and Full, regardless of its size.

Behold forumers, these are gems of wisdom!

[ryengineer]

Thirded

[XCoalMiner]

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A hard drive always has two stable states: New and Full, regardless of its size.
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That is both humorous and true at the same time.

[Temetka]

I speak the truth(stuff about hardware becoming obsolete)

You are preaching to the choir brother.

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