Thinkpads Forum

320GB HDDs: WD, Hitachi, Fujitsu, or Seagate?

Whats the best?

FIGHT!

Check out this thread:

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?p=449808

I bought a 320gb Seagate for my T60p and it died in 3 days. Returned it for the Hitatchi 320gb. Has been working well. Oh well.

I have several of the Seagate 320GB drives. Best laptop drives I've ever owned...

Hitachi for me. Quiet, never hot and very fast.

I should have noted that two things that sold me on the new Seagate drives were the built in G shock sensor and 5 YEAR warranty. I think all drives do a good job however.

I'd vote 1st for the Hitachi, 2nd Seagate and third WD. I'm in fact getting a 5K320 by the end of the year.

Getting the Seagate...we shall see how it goes. My current drive only gets somewhere around 10-20MB/s right now (dont know why), so this will be a welcome speed and space boost (from a 100GB Drive)

Thanks alot!

Bought a 200GB Seagate with inbuilt sensor to replace a slow 5400RPM drive that came with my T61. Works perfectly, can't say I feel any speed up, but that's because I haven't gotten rid of all the cruft that is pre-installed.

I'd say Hitachi or Seagate, both very good drives.

I bout the Seagate 320GB 7200.3 drive. Extremely fast. How do I figure out if it has the G-shock sensor built in or not? If it does I'll remove the IBM version of it.

I have the WD, had it for about a month now and it's lasted longer than my Hitachi already.

bradhs wrote:I bout the Seagate 320GB 7200.3 drive. Extremely fast. How do I figure out if it has the G-shock sensor built in or not? If it does I'll remove the IBM version of it.

bradhs, When I purchased my drives online (like newegg) there is usually a manufactor's link to their product page. The seagate site will give you more info on this.

IIRC, the drives model number (ST...) has an additional "G" letter at the end if it has the G-shock sensor.

I'm bumping this up in hopes of seeing some more user comments about these 320Gb 7200rpm drives, especially Seagate vs. Hitachi.

I've read other posts and some online reviews, but I'd like to hear some more before committing my dollars.

Thanks.

I went with the WD Scorpio Black 320gb, just installed it this week.

Most noticeable attribute is that it's virtually silent. Also feels a bit faster than the Hitachi 100gb that it replaced.

I was on my third 100gb Hitachi (Lenovo has replaced it both times), so I thought I'd go with another make.

I'll report back with some performance tests in Vista 64 if anyone's interested.

dhave wrote:I'm bumping this up in hopes of seeing some more user comments about these 320Gb 7200rpm drives, especially Seagate vs. Hitachi.

In my recent experience with 7200 rpm SATA drives, Seagate is the handsdown winner in terms of real throughput.

In terms of reliability I haven't seen any significant difference between Seagate, WD, Hitachi, Fujitsu or Samsung drives, so can't pick on that basis.

Cheers,

Bill B.

Just bought 2 320GB seagates, one for primary and one for the serial ata drive bay. Going to use Acronis True Image 2008.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822148336

So when ghosting to the drive bay, do I load True Image onto a usb key and boot from that? What's the best way to do it so I have no issues as I want to be able to replace the primary with the drive bay disk if/when it fails.

Thanks...

I just ordered a WD Scorpio Black 320GB for my T60. I was going to get a Seagate but got scared off by all these death-in-first-month reports. WD also has the best random access times which IMHO is more important in day to day computing than Seagate's very high throughput rates. I'm looking forward to see how noisy it will be. Comments on the web are different, some say it's silent, others that they cannot stand it.

Will post back later when it arrives and I finish installing it.

yak wrote:I just ordered a WD Scorpio Black 320GB for my T60. I was going to get a Seagate but got scared off by all these death-in-first-month reports. WD also has the best random access times which IMHO is more important in day to day computing than Seagate's very high throughput rates.

Can you explain why random access time is more significant than throughput, please? I'd like to know more.

yak wrote:I'm looking forward to see how noisy it will be. Comments on the web are different, some say it's silent, others that they cannot stand it.

I've seen these wildly different comments, too, and am wondering what it means. Could it have to do with machine differences -- position of the drive in the laptop, for example?

yak wrote:Will post back later when it arrives and I finish installing it.

Great. I'll look forward to reading your comments. I'm going to try to wait until I get a little more first-hand info from Thinkpad users.

@dhave

Take a look at the SSD drives. They have similar throughputs but almost zero access times and that's what makes them so fast.

Normally when you use a computer, it is accessing a lot of rather small files and searching for them on the harddrive is what takes most of the time. If you have a low access time, the harddrive finds them faster. Throughput is of course also important but a very good one can only be perceived when doing a large file copy for example.

About the noise, true, the comments can be affected by many things including different laptop casings. It is also possible that there are some lemons that these people got. Hopefully mine will be ok. The T60 has these rubber HDD rails so I hope it will absorb some excessive vibrations.

yak wrote:@dhave

Take a look at the SSD drives. ... The T60 has these rubber HDD rails so I hope it will absorb some excessive vibrations.

Thanks, yak. That's helpful.

Ok. Just received the WD3200BEKT.

Right now I have it connected to the T60 with an IDE/SATA->USB adapter (cool thing to have btw). With HD Tune I get a constant 30MB/s transfer rate (limited by the USB of course) and a great 14.7 ms access time. I'm impressed.

The drive is very quiet. Sure, you can hear it working but I doubt I will hear it when I put it inside the laptop without putting my ear to the palmrest.

Btw, it was manufactured on Nov. 1 so it sort of came to me straight from the factory . It was produced in Thailand btw.

Off to install Vista Ultimate on it...

The drive is in, Vista is installed.

Yes, the drive vibrates a bit more than a 60GB/5400rpm one I had before (Fujitsu) and yes, it's easier to percieve that it's there (easier to hear it spinning). But the difference is very small and performance/space gain is huge. And the palmrest stays cool.

Totally worth it.

I installed a Seagate 320gig, 7k drive in my T60P in August and it is working flawlessly. One great thing about Seagate is the free download from their web site of a program called DiscWizard. This is basically a free copy of Acronis and supposedly works only with a Seagate drive. It worked great in cloning my old Hitachi drive to the new Seagate drive. I haven't tried it with two non-Seagate drives.

jhkaska wrote:I installed a Seagate 320gig, 7k drive in my T60P in August and it is working flawlessly. One great thing about Seagate is the free download from their web site of a program called DiscWizard. This is basically a free copy of Acronis and supposedly works only with a Seagate drive. It worked great in cloning my old Hitachi drive to the new Seagate drive. I haven't tried it with two non-Seagate drives.

FYI, it doesn't work with non-Seagate drives. But you can always download and use the trial version of Acronis if it is for a one-time cloning only.

Diskwizard will install on any system but it will not run if it does not detect a Seagate or Maxtor hard drive when you start the program.

I recently got the Seagate Momentus 7200.3 as replacement for the 200GB Hitachi drive that came with the system. And while I cannot really say whether its faster or not in real life because of the clean Vista installation, I can say is that the new drive is generally very silent. In my case it emits some subtle but hearable ticking noises on drive access that can be heard in quiet environments. Time will show whether this becomes annoying eventiually. Heat and vibration of the Momentus seem to be fine so far.

he Hitachi drive was really good as far as I can tell in terms of speed, noise, etc.. so it raised the bar quite a bit.



Jo