Hitachi or Seagate

[steveg47]

I just received an email from Lenovo that my T60P will ship tonight
I now need to quickly order a 7200rpm/100mb drive(sata) and am torn between ordering a Seagate Momentus or a Hitachi Travelstar. I have a travelstar(60gb/7200) in my x23 and it's been fine; however, the travelstar only has a 3 year warrantee and a very poor repair/replace policy which takes a minimum of 14 days if your lucky, whereas the Seagate has a 5 year warrantee and a cross shipment option which will allow for a replacement in a few days. The difference in cost is only about $10 more for the Seagate.

I am leaning toward the Seagate; but am very interested in hearing your recommendations, opinions and experiences.

[christopher_wolf]

Well, if it is service and warranty you are worried about, you might go for the Seagate; but as far as the actual HDDs themselves are concerned, I would just choose the Hitachi. If you really aren't all that sensitive to various subtleties in each of the drives, it really doesn't make too much of a difference no matter which one you pick.

[tomh009]

I just received an email from Lenovo that my T60P will ship tonight
I now need to quickly order a 7200rpm/100mb drive(sata) and am torn between ordering a Seagate Momentus or a Hitachi Travelstar. I have a travelstar(60gb/7200) in my x23 and it's been fine; however, the travelstar only has a 3 year warrantee and a very poor repair/replace policy which takes a minimum of 14 days if your lucky, whereas the Seagate has a 5 year warrantee and a cross shipment option which will allow for a replacement in a few days. The difference in cost is only about $10 more for the Seagate.

I am leaning toward the Seagate; but am very interested in hearing your recommendations, opinions and experiences.

I personally prefer the 7K100 and my experience with Hitachi has been better than with Seagate. My gut feel is that you'll get 60% Hitachi support on these forums and 40% Seagate.

[steveg47]

Well, if it is service and warranty you are worried about, you might go for the Seagate; but as far as the actual HDDs themselves are concerned, I would just choose the Hitachi. If you really aren't all that sensitive to various subtleties in each of the drives, it really doesn't make too much of a difference no matter which one you pick.

I haven't had any hands on experience with the Seagate so it's difficult to choose, what subtleties are you speaking of?

[steveg47]

Thank you all for your responses. Virtually all the reviews I read last night concluded that there was very little difference between the two except for the warrantee so I decided to be adventurous and go with the Seagate.

[hoya]

I would go with Hitachi as well - I have the Seagate 7200.1 and it feels slow to me, much slower than the 120gb fujitsu 5400rpm drive in my new T60.

[ronan_zj]

I would go with Hitachi as well - I have the Seagate 7200.1 and it feels slow to me, much slower than the 120gb fujitsu 5400rpm drive in my new T60.

Seagate 7200.2 is out , but I can find it on market yet. shees
I think HITACHI is good, but it is noisy.
Seagate 7200.2 maybe good , I am still waitting for review.

[hoya]

Seagate has a bad habit of announcing their products way ahead of the actual release date, and once the product is on the market the prices are exhorbitant for quite awhile.

this review seems to favor the 7200.1 for real-world apps:
http://www.storagereview.com/articles/2 ... 1AS_1.html

Tom's also has a review which includes the SATA version of the 7200.1 but only the ATA version of the 7K100:
http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/11/11/ ... rk_results

[allen]

newb question here, why get the hard drive seperatly? i tried to look at prices, to add $180 from the standard when building, or to buy a 100GB 7200 seagate, is only like what $30 difference?

[hoya]

I went the pre-built route which came with a 5400rpm drive so I had to buy a drive separately. believe me, I would happily pay $100 to avoid fooling with an upgrade!

[marlinspike]

The reason to order separately is for the price of upgrading to a 7200rpm drive you can get a 7200rpm drive from a place like Newegg and a thinkbay adapter from lenovo and then you have 2 hard drives for the same price as getting the 7200rpm drive pre installed.

[claudeo]

This is anecdotal and the past does not predict the future, but the only drives I had that started "clacking" and had to be retired were Hitachi drives. The Seagates have been sweet.

The one argument for getting the HD upgrade when you order the computer is that you won't have to waste time on learning the tricks involved in re-imaging the system partition and the service partition and then the time in actually doing it. Depending on how much your time (or your IT people's time) is worth it may or may not be a consideration.

[ronan_zj]

newb question here, why get the hard drive seperatly? i tried to look at prices, to add $180 from the standard when building, or to buy a 100GB 7200 seagate, is only like what $30 difference?

ur calculation seems right. However, u did not count that if u buy seperatly from other place, you will get EXTRA HD!!!

[tomh009]

I think HITACHI is good, but it is noisy.

The 7K100 in my X31 is definitely not noisy.

[MountainMan]

my strategy: configure with the least expensive drive possible. buy the drive i want separately. use partition magic and trueimage to clone the original drive to the new drive. put the original drive in storage.

now, if i ever have to send the laptop in for repairs, swap in the original drive. i don't need to give the company access to the hard drive that has all my stuff on it.

[indigo]

No No No!

Hitachi is the devil......

My experiences...

IBM Desktstar 60GXP 30GB drive (failed after 1.5 years)
IBM Deskstar 60GXP 20GB drive (failed after 3 years)
IBM Deskstar 40GB 5,400 RPM (failed after 2 years)

IBM Ultra160 10kRPM SCSI 18GB drive (died after 2 years)
IBM Ultra160 15kRPM SCSI 36GB drive (died in less than 2 years)

IBM 5k80 80GB laptop drive out of my T42p, died after 1.5 years.

**Every* single IBM/Hitache drive I have owned has failed. Given the cirumstances that I take good care of them (activly cooled in a well ventilated case with good power supplies) and they *still* predictibly fail across different product lines, I think this is horrible. Do *any* research on the Deskstar (aka: Deathstar) or the IBM 5k80 ticking issues and you will see.... (the Enterprise SCSI drives failing are still a sad tradgety)

[MountainMan]

of your 6 hitachi drives, 5 failed within 2 yrs and the 6th failed within 3 yrs? that's really hard to believe, unless you're using them under some adverse conditions.

no modern drive manufacturer has anywhere near that kind of failure rate.

in my own case, i have 4 hitachi desktop drives (2 yrs old) and 1 hitachi laptop drive (2.5 yrs old), all running perfectly. never a hiccup out of any of them.

[iatacs19]

I prefer Hitachi/IBM because you can enable AAM.

[snessiram]

Anyone an opinion on iomega?

I recently bought an external 320GB iomega. I actually would have prefered a hitachi, but that doesn't seem to be sold in the stores I go.
I do know that in my creative zen touch there's a 20GB hitachi. I dropped my zen touch hard and the touchpad broke down (sadly ), no problems with the disk. (the player was I think on and running)
(My now half year old Archos XS202 also has a 20GB hitachi)