Thinkpads Forum

A seller on eBay was explaining to me that the 7200RPM 100GB Hitachi/Travelstar on the IBM t4x series is less stable and has a shorter life than the 7200rpm 60 or 80 GB.

Is that true?

This was his repsonse to my inquiry as to why he was selling the 60 and the 80 drives for almost the same price as the 100gb drive, when all drives had the same speed. In fact, when you break the numbers down, the 60 drive is far more expensive than the other two above it, followed by the 80 and the 100 is the cheapest.

The 60 was like $181.00, the 80 is $209.00 and the 100 $239.00 (and another seller had the same 100 for $193.00)

The seller's statement is nonsense.

You should NEVER buy primary HDs from eBay!

It's fine if you're shopping for a cheap, used drive to use in an external case to hold all of your music, videos, movies, etc.

But for the main HD in your system or a drive you want to be able to rely on, get it from a known supplier. Zipzoomfly.com is preferred with Newegg.com second.

Either will beat those eBay prices by a WIDE margin for a new drive. Try ~$132 with free 2nd day shipping for a 7K60 at Zipzoomfly! ~$120 delivered for the same drive from Newegg, but it's an OEM drive sans warranty.

Please don't post the same subject in multiple forums.

I've deleted this thread from the T40 forum and will leave it here.

Regards,

James

sorry james.
I was trying to delete the other re posts in the t4X section when i saw that this was the more appropriate forum.
thanks.

I've heard from techs that data corruption and damage happens at a very high rate to the newer high capacity 2.5" drives, not sure if it is related to speed, but the denser platters apparently wear out

Actually I did a search for "HardDrive" in this forum and I found some consistent praise and even a Drive test at Xbix that upholds the Hitachi Travelstar 100GB at 7200rpm as the mother of all HDs that you can get today in terms of speed performance and durabilty.
It beat out all the other brands in the 100GB league, as well as the entire range (including the Hitachi-Travelstar brand) of 60GB HD@7200rpm...

I wish I had that link but the comparison graphs clearly shows that on it's slowest day the Hitachi100GB-7200rpm beats every other known HD ever made to date.

amazing!


certainly sold me...and I'm a man of data and charts.

JHEM wrote:Try ~$132 with free 2nd day shipping for a 7K60 at Zipzoomfly! ~$120 delivered for the same drive from Newegg, but it's an OEM drive sans warranty. [Emphasis added.]

'Splain, please?

Are you saying that ZZF sells IBM-branded 7K60s but NE sells Hitachi, or that NE sells drives minus the mfr's standard three-year warranty?

I recently priced the 7K100 100GB, and both sites offered the same Hitachi drive with a three-year warranty.

Your ebay seller is spreading misinformation and lies. The 100GB 7k100 ata-6 drive is rock solid and stable in this T43.

brooklynboy wrote:Are you saying that ZZF sells IBM-branded 7K60s but NE sells Hitachi, or that NE sells drives minus the mfr's standard three-year warranty?

I recently priced the 7K100 100GB, and both sites offered the same Hitachi drive with a three-year warranty.

They both sell the same HGST drives.

Let me 'splain, and qualify, my earlier statement.

In the past there had been problems reported that drives gotten from Newegg described as OEM did not have any warranty, regardess of what they stated on their webpage. Nowadays, we usually tell folks who get their HGST HDs from Newegg to check their warranty status here: http://www.hgst.com/warranty/jsp/index.jsp immediately upon receipt.

Just to be sure.

Regards,

James

Highly irregular, but thanks. Good thing ZZF's a good $10 cheaper on the 7K100 I've been considering.

Delmarco wrote:Actually I did a search for "HardDrive" in this forum and I found some consistent praise and even a Drive test at Xbix that upholds the Hitachi Travelstar 100GB at 7200rpm as the mother of all HDs that you can get today in terms of speed performance and durabilty.
It beat out all the other brands in the 100GB league, as well as the entire range (including the Hitachi-Travelstar brand) of 60GB HD@7200rpm...

I wish I had that link but the comparison graphs clearly shows that on it's slowest day the Hitachi100GB-7200rpm beats every other known HD ever made to date.

I think this is the article you're referring to:

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storag ... -7200.html

I don't think the article makes any claims about durability. Perhaps I missed that. Can you please point out wear the article says the Hitachi 7k100 is the most durable drive?

Also, the Hitachi 7k100 did not blow the comparable Seagate 7200rpm drives out of the water. Some of the speed differences are fairly small. 10 to 20%. I keep saying this in so many threads, but I just don't think most people for most uses are going to notice these small differences. People get all worked about about fractional differences (when it comes to drives, processors, everything). I think unless there's at least a 50% speed gain, few people are going to notice (only those with very specialized uses). And even then not that much.

Also the Seagate drives beat the Hitachi in some tests. So you need to have an idea what you're using your drive for and pick it appropriately.

Lastly, based on research I've done in other forums and articles, I think the Seagate drives are probably the most durable. (They also offer a 5 year warranty. No one else--Hitachi included--offers more than a 3 year warranty.)

donking! wrote:Lastly, based on research I've done in other forums and articles, I think the Seagate drives are probably the most durable. (They also offer a 5 year warranty. No one else--Hitachi included--offers more than a 3 year warranty.)

Small comfort when the Seagate dies and takes all your data with it, even if they replace it 35 times.

I wouldn't have a Seagate HD ever again on a bet.

$.02.

Regards,

James

JHEM wrote:Small comfort when the Seagate dies and takes all your data with it, even if they replace it 35 times.

I wouldn't have a Seagate HD ever again on a bet.

Hi,

I'm in the market for a 100GB 7200RPM hard drive as well. I've been reading the threads. Until I see this post of JHEM, it seemed to me that seagate and hitachi are both pretty much the same, and I decided to go with seagate since it's a little more quiet, and since hitachi might have that 2010 error issue in my T43.

JHEM: Did you have (or heard of) any experience with seagate that it died on you? As far as I can remember, you were pretty mild for both of the drives in your posts. But in this one you stated that you would never have a seagate again.

Thanks.

hiyel wrote:JHEM: Did you have (or heard of) any experience with seagate that it died on you?

I have no current experience with the new Seagate HDs, but based on my prior experiences with Seagate in general, I doubt if I'll ever get one or suggest that anyone else do.

Regards,

James

JHEM wrote:Small comfort when the Seagate dies and takes all your data with it, even if they replace it 35 times.

I wouldn't have a Seagate HD ever again on a bet.

JHEM wrote:I have no current experience with the new Seagate HDs, but based on my prior experiences with Seagate in general, I doubt if I'll ever get one or suggest that anyone else do.

JHEM, I totally respect that you've had bad experiences with Seagate drives and never want to go back to them. I had bad experiences with Western Digital drives once and have little inclination to use them again, regardless of how they may develop in the future. I'm sure we've all had drives fail and hold it against the manufacturer.

That said, however, I don't think that a single person's experience is statistically or otherwise significant in determining the reliability of a whole brand of drives. Without question, people have had drives of any brand fail, even fail very permaturely.

I concluded that Seagate drives are probably the most reliable drives, because I read a lot of articles about drive reliability in which they tended to be one of the top manufacturers for reliability. (For example, in storagereview.com's reliability survey--with 30,000 respondents--they seem to be much more reliable than the Hitachi drives.) And I found in web forums for IT people that more IT people found Seagate drives to be the most reliable, than any other make. I take IT people seriously, because they deal with hundreds of drives for their companies. So they have a much better overall picture of the reliability question than what can be garnered from a couple experiences of a single person.

I realize my own conclusions are not scientific. But it's the best information I have so far. I only refer to the Seagate warranty, because I do think it says something about their drives that they are willing to stand behind them for almost twice as long as other manufacturers.

suggest to merge this post with:
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.ph ... 673#139673


(very similar topics)...

donking! wrote:I concluded that Seagate drives are probably the most reliable drives, because I read a lot of articles about drive reliability in which they tended to be one of the top manufacturers for reliability. (For example, in storagereview.com's reliability survey--with 30,000 respondents--they seem to be much more reliable than the Hitachi drives.)

30K respondents would have to include 3.5" HDs in the equation, not what we were discussing at all!

From StorageReview.com: "The StorageReview Leaderboard briefly describes the drives that we believe are the best in their given categories. Note, however, that these capsule comments are not a substitute for the full reviews of drives readers may be considering.

2.5" Notebook Drive - Hitachi Travelstar 7K100 - Lowest Price: $179.00

Hitachi's flagship offering combines state-of-the-art capacity and speed into a neat little package that's guaranteed to jumpstart sluggish laptop machines everywhere."

Is a single person's experience statistically significant if their clients own over 40K Thinkpads?

Regards,

James

JHEM wrote:30K respondents would have to include 3.5" HDs in the equation, not what we were discussing at all!

I was discussing how reliable a particular manufacturer's hard drives are in general. A question which I think is relevant to evaluating the reliability of their 2.5" drives. Is there no transfer of engineering knowledge from one size drive to the other, within a manufacturing company? Further, it's not like we have much to go on, since reliability is such an under studied issue. But if I see consistent quality over time, over a very large number of drives, I think this is a worthwhile (though certainly not conclusive) indicator. (Isn't this one of the major reasons we all keep coming back to the ThinkPads?) A manufacturer's overall quality in turn is important because new drives are coming out all the time, so we'd have to wait until a particular model is pretty out-dated before people had any significant (years long) experience, from which to draw more meaningful conclusions.

JHEM wrote:From StorageReview.com: "The StorageReview Leaderboard briefly describes the drives that we believe are the best in their given categories. Note, however, that these capsule comments are not a substitute for the full reviews of drives readers may be considering.

2.5" Notebook Drive - Hitachi Travelstar 7K100 - Lowest Price: $179.00

Hitachi's flagship offering combines state-of-the-art capacity and speed into a neat little package that's guaranteed to jumpstart sluggish laptop machines everywhere."

Where does it say anything in there about reliability? I was talking about reliability. I don't understand "best" to mean reliable. Nor "flagship." Storage Review clearly doesn't mean "best" nor "flagship" to mean anything other than the highest performing drive from a manufacturer.

In fact, right after the paragraph you quote from Storage Review, they go on to say:

"Contemporary hard drives may be sorted by a variety of performance and environmental metrics in the StorageReview Drive Performance Database. Custom head-to-head comparisons can be created through any selected sort.

Past Leaders dating back to our third-generation testbed are listed below each category." (From where you quote what they say about the 7k100.)

Storage review clearly says here they are establishing "leaders" by "performance and environmental metrics" (e.g. speed, noise, heat). They therefore explicitly do not include reliability as a factor in determining "leaders."

For that matter almost no hard drive reviews discuss reliability. And Storage Review pretty much as a rule doesn't discuss reliability in its reviews. That only comes up in their reliability survey, which is what I was very specifically referring to.

JHEM wrote:Is a single person's experience statistically significant if their clients own over 40K Thinkpads?

Are you referring to yourself here? If so, do those 40k Thinkpads generally have Seagate drives in them (aren't they usually Hitachi or Fujitsu?)? I was under the impression when you said you'd had bad experiences with Seagate that you were referring to a couple drives you'd personally used, not to hundreds or thousands of drives on clients computers. If that's the case, with your experience, it would be interesting to hear you elaborate on that more. How many Seagate drives you dealt with, what models, what happened with them, what sort of use they saw, etc.

Obviously, above, I was referring to the opinions of IT people (who I have generally seen praise Seagate in terms of reliability). I placed value on the opinions of IT people, as I explained, because they work with hundreds if not thousands of hard drives and may get a general sense of their quality. So I have no debate with the idea that a single person's opinion could be significant in that sort of circumstance (though their opinion would certainly not be statistically significant--since their general sense of their experience is still subjective, unless they prepare an appropriately forumlated study of all the drives they work with).

donking! wrote:I was discussing how reliable a particular manufacturer's hard drives are in general. A question which I think is relevant to evaluating the reliability of their 2.5" drives. Is there no transfer of engineering knowledge from one size drive to the other, within a manufacturing company?

No, not really. During the period of time IBM was making their name for producing very reliable Travelstar laptops HDs, they were also producing the infamous "Deathstar" Deskstar HDs. Don't forget that most of the parts used in manufacturing a HD are off the shelf items from sub-contractors that the drive builder has little control over. Only takes one bad batch of head stepping motors to result in a bunch of dead drives, and many times bad drives aren't even due to any fault on the builder's part.

donking! wrote:Obviously, above, I was referring to the opinions of IT people (who I have generally seen praise Seagate in terms of reliability).

The Seagate HDs IT types would normally, and correctly, tout would be the 3.5" ones.

For now, the jury is still out on Seagate's laptop offerings as they don't have a large enough base of installed units since they redesigned them to have developed a recent history. I'd love to be proven wrong about their reliability, if only to have another source for drives, but my personal opinion right now is to give them a wide berth.

Just my $.02 as I said earlier and the result of having been burned in the past.

Regards,

James

I take your point about the relationship between reliability on 2.5" and 3.5" drives not necessarily being strong. My assumption of a transfer of engineering know how within the same manufacturer (regardless of the form factor of the drive) is certainly an assumption and not a strong indicator. I guess I'm just trying to work with what really fairly meager information is out there.

JHEM wrote:For now, the jury is still out on Seagate's laptop offerings as they don't have a large enough base of installed units since they redesigned them to have developed a recent history. I'd love to be proven wrong about their reliability, if only to have another source for drives, but my personal opinion right now is to give them a wide berth.

I guess it will come as no surprise that I'm willing to be a guinea pig on this one! Guess I'll see if my convictions are warranted.

donking! wrote:I guess it will come as no surprise that I'm willing to be a guinea pig on this one! Guess I'll see if my convictions are warranted.

If only to confuse the issue a bit more ( ) I'll share the fact wth you that I'm awaiting the arrival of a Seagate Perpendicular Recording ST9160821A 160GB HD to test for a client!

I'll let you all know what I conclude.

Regards,

James

JHEM wrote:Perpendicular Recording

Does that mean it that instead of recording data as "1"s and "0"s, it records them as "-"s and "o"s

Cheers,

Bill

G'day Bill,

bill bolton wrote:Does that mean it that instead of recording data as "1"s and "0"s, it records them as "-"s and "o"s

Nah, just means they've changed their orientation.

Not that there's anything wrong with that......

Regards,

James

JHEM wrote:...I'm awaiting the arrival of a Seagate Perpendicular Recording ST9160821A 160GB HD to test...

I'll let you all know what I conclude.

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=22003

Above link by "w0qj" in one of the reviews, the review stated that the Seagate 5400.3 160 GB 2.5" HDD platters are made of "glass" instead of aluminum, and the review sounded concerned about the durability of the magnetic medium on glass surface (presumably it might fall off more easily at the end of the HDD life, especially after the 1st bad sector appears).

Do you think this is true?

What is the advantages of using aluminum platters over glass platters in HDD's?

w0qj wrote:HDD platters are made of "glass" instead of aluminum, and the review sounded concerned about the durability of the magnetic medium on glass surface (presumably it might fall off more easily at the end of the HDD life, especially after the 1st bad sector appears

Glass! Now, I suppose we'll start seeing threads about the potential dangers of Windex and hard disk platters!

Cheers,

Bill

JHEM wrote:If only to confuse the issue a bit more ( ) I'll share the fact wth you that I'm awaiting the arrival of a Seagate Perpendicular Recording ST9160821A 160GB HD to test for a client!

That is a scandalous revelation! Definitely curious to hear what you think of the drive once you've tried it out.

*

I didn't see any mention of glass in the reviews w0qj linked to. I think it's this page of this review that w0qj is thinking of:

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storag ... 003_2.html

Just looking around quickly on Google, here's a discussion of the shift in hard drives happening away from aluminum alloys and towards glass/ceramic composites.

http://www.storagereview.com/guide2000/ ... rials.html

It looks like basically glass/ceramic is more stable for storing data generally, it's main down side is the fragility of the platters themselves (which is why composites are being developed with ceramics). Apparently moving to glass/ceramic is necessary, in order to be able to have thinner platters and continue to increase the capacity of hard drives in their given form factors.

i agree actually on the seagate thing though ive installed managed and own more computers then i can even remember and with the exception of a few western digitals, the niggest death rate ive had was seagate id definatly keep an eye on them

The brand reliability issue is essentially ____ (insert your favorite 4 letter word).

They all have had bad models, and all fail about equal in most cases. The big diff's are warranty, and speed of the drive, as well as heat/noise generated.

IMHO seagate desktop drives are superior for warranty and heat/noise generated... but laptop? not quite yet. My last experience with a 5400 100GB drive wasn't great. Pretty quiet but very hot. Especially for the cost, I'd expect more.