Thinkpads Forum

Best Hard Drive HDD Options 750GB/ 640GB/ Momentus XT 500G?

I'd love to get an SSD but I typically have a lot more storage requirement and planning multiple OSes on partitions.

So I am looking at a 9.5 mm HDD that will seat in T61 & X61T (Both Middleton BIOS flashed for SATA 2). I might use it in both now & then.

Since 750 G is the highest.. in 9.5 mm I'd prefer that as long as performance & reliability of disks is fine.
I believe WD, Hitachi (Not easily available on market online these days) Seagate & Toshiba (not great reviews) have 750 G.

Ofcourse WD 640 Blue is pretty popular in general and so is the Hitachi 500GB 7200 among thinkpadders.

So recent / updated thoughts, experiences, recommendations and/or threads of interest that have relevant info to help me decide.

The 500gb WD Scorpio Black is a great drive and is on par with a decent desktop drive. I believe it is a fairly popular notebook drive these days.


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hunterman223 wrote:The 500gb WD Scorpio Black is a great drive and is on par with a decent desktop drive. I believe it is a fairly popular notebook drive these days.

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I am not sure but kind remember reading some issues noise/ rattling/ heat/ excess battery usage somewhere? Do comment?

I believe the 320gb Scorpio Black had some issues, but from what I have read online not the 500gb. (WD5000BEKT) Browsing the internet or watching movies it stays nice and cool, when playing games it gets warm, but is quick to cool back down. Noise isn't enough to comment on really, a low humming sound can be heard when close to the laptop, but of course it is a 7200rpm drive.

The WD 640gb Scorpio Blue you mentioned is of course a 5400rpm drive, so will be quieter with slightly more storage space with the trade off of performance. Which is more important to you?

The Momentus XT is apparently not all it is cracked up to be if you read the articles. The SSD part of it is apparently slower than you would think and the drive itself is not great. The caching function to speed up access for frequently used files seems to be quite finicky.

Give this a read --> http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/not ... ,2832.html

After reading end-user feedback on Amazon and NewEgg, it seems that either the Samsung SpinPoint 7200 rpm 640GB or the old standby, WD Scorpio Black 7200 rpm 500GB, may be the best non-SSD choices today.

If voting with $$$ counts, I would 2nd underclocker's opinion. I have used (read spent hard earned $$$ on) both drives that he mentions and many others. While I generally prefer WD these days, the Samsung drive in this case is equally good.

underclocker wrote:Give this a read --> http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/not ... ,2832.html

After reading end-user feedback on Amazon and NewEgg, it seems that either the Samsung SpinPoint 7200 rpm 640GB or the old standby, WD Scorpio Black 7200 rpm 500GB, may be the best non-SSD choices today.

Okay lets leave the Momentus XT Hybrid out. Are you saying none of the 750G drives are good?

Depends on which 750gb drive you are talking about. They're not at all definitely bad, the ones myself and underclocker had mentioned are some of the most popular, so "tried and tested." I tend to only buy Western Digital and Samsung drives, but everyone's drive preferences are different.


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crashnburn wrote:I am not sure but kind remember reading some issues noise/ rattling/ heat/ excess battery usage somewhere? Do comment?

My experience with the 500GB Scorpio Black is:
Noise: gentle whooshing; seek noise non-existent
Rattling: very slight vibration, not really noticeable when the laptop is on a surface.
Heat: Warms up a smidge under load, but generally doesn't exceed 40C, except for on hot days. 320GB one got really hot.
Power consumption: Pretty good. On par with my old Fujitsu 5400RPM drive.

Great drive overall, plenty fast. Really cheap now, but I suppose you could just get a 750GB Scorpio Black.

EDIT: Also, I personally don't like Samsung drives; a 500GB 5400RPM one in my friend's SONY takes two minutes to boot a fresh copy of Windows 7. That's way worse than my X100e (40-50 seconds) with worse specs everywhere.

EDIT 2: If you're bent on getting some flash cache, then maybe eBoostr on Windows and a nice 8GB SD card in the card reader would work. It dropped my above-mentioned friend's SONY's boot time by a fair bit as well as massively increased the sluggish system's responsiveness. (Seriously, the drive sucks.)

I usually prefer Western Digital but I have a Seagate Momentus 500gb 7200rpm in one of my laptops that hasn't given me any troubles. It's not loud and it loads the OS really quickly. It's also fast at opening programs. As far as heat, the laptop does get hot but I don't think it's because of the hard drive. It seems to be near the CPU and laptop battery.

Go with the latest gen Hitachi Travelstars. Standard equipment on Thinkpads.

Bánh mì wrote:Go with the latest gen Hitachi Travelstars. Standard equipment on Thinkpads.

Does that really mean anything these days? And they're not all Hitachi, it's another one of those luck-of-the-draw Lenovo irks.

Plus WD bought HGST.

Colonel O'Neill wrote:Plus WD bought HGST.

Exactly. All Hitachi drives are low availability/ out of stock and the 750G on Amazon has 2-4 weeks until shipping.

Looks like Hitachi disks are going off the market?

Just ordered a 750G WD Scorpio Black based on Amazon reviews and recommendations be several people on NotebookReview forums.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/hardwar ... -500g.html

http://forum.notebookreview.com/hardwar ... rives.html

You cant get Lenovo custom built machine with a WD750 GB drive, or am I mistaken...?

Not right now, but you can order one (Hitachi) from Microcenter (http://www.microcenter.com/) and add it yourself.