Thinkpads Forum

To measure the performance of my new HDD I used HD Tune. What do you think about these results? Are they acceptable?

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Sorry.
I edited the post. Hope this is ok now.

These drives have excellent throughput, great for servers. But the access time is very poor which is why you haven't noticed any gain in everyday performance. The WD has the best access times but vibration problems as others have noted. If you can return the Seagate, I just getting the Fujitsu 7200rpm 320gb drive. That's what I ended up with after two WD Scorpio Black drives with bad vibration problems. The access time is only slightly worse (15.2ms), but it's vibration free and absolutely silent. The Hitachi 7K500 was recently released, probably the best drive at the moment because of it's 250gb/platter. Hitachi's in my experience are a bit noisier though.

Thanks for your input.
I wanted to get a Hitachi Travelstar as it was recommended by a member of this forum, but the problem is that it is very hard to get either Hitachi or Fujitsu drives here in my vicinity. That's why I ended up with the seagate drive.
After searching the net I came to conclusion that as far as I am concerned there is no point to get 7200 RPM drive as it makes more noise for unimpressive performance. Now I am pondering the idea to get some good 5400 RPM 320GB drive (I really do not want to pay for 500GB as I really do not need that much space). I have found some Travelstar 5K500.B.
By the way, do you have any experience with samsung M7 5400 RPM drives?

vinuneuro wrote:The WD has the best access times.....

I have Seagate, WD and Hitachi 320G 7200 rpm 2.5" drives across my T61/X61/T400/X200 ThinkPad set.... in practice I can't pick any operational speed differences between them in my day to day system usage.

Cheers,

Bill B.

Yes, this seems to be the truth one discovers after looking through different benchmarks published all around the net. It is impossible to to fell the difference between let's say 5 milliseconds.
However, I somehow assumed that 7200 RPM drives are considerably faster than 5400 RPM which it is not as it seems to me now.

In the T60 I'm typing this post on, I've used the WD Scorpio Black, Scorpio Blue, Seagate 7200.4, Hitachi 5K320 (what ever the Lenovo oem drive was) and Fujitsu MHZ2320BJ (current drive). As far as responsiveness goes there was a massive difference between the WD Blue and Seagate an compared to the WD Black and Fujitsu. The original Hitachi drive was a total dog compared to all of them.

If you look through the notebookreview forums, someone posted a link to a review that included real-world tests (ie. not synthetic) and the 7200.4 is actually a tad slower than the Scorpio Blue.

Eudoxus, do some actual research and you won't have trouble finding the best drive to use. The good 7200 rpm drives (WD, Hitachi, Fujitsu) easily out-perform all the 5400 rpm drives. I haven't tried the 7200rpm Hitachi (either of them).

Samsung laptop drives are bottom tier in both performance and power consumption.

bill bolton wrote: I have Seagate, WD and Hitachi 320G 7200 rpm 2.5" drives across my T61/X61/T400/X200 ThinkPad set.... in practice I can't pick any operational speed differences between them in my day to day system usage.

Cheers,

Bill B.

Vin - Thanks for the awesome input. I'd love to have some more of your insights on this front. Really appreciate it.

vinuneuro wrote:In the T60 I'm typing this post on, I've used the WD Scorpio Black, Scorpio Blue, Seagate 7200.4, Hitachi 5K320 (what ever the Lenovo oem drive was) and Fujitsu MHZ2320BJ (current drive). As far as responsiveness goes there was a massive difference between the WD Blue and Seagate an compared to the WD Black and Fujitsu. The original Hitachi drive was a total dog compared to all of them.

If you look through the notebookreview forums, someone posted a link to a review that included real-world tests (ie. not synthetic) and the 7200.4 is actually a tad slower than the Scorpio Blue.

Eudoxus, do some actual research and you won't have trouble finding the best drive to use. The good 7200 rpm drives (WD, Hitachi, Fujitsu) easily out-perform all the 5400 rpm drives. I haven't tried the 7200rpm Hitachi (either of them).

Samsung laptop drives are bottom tier in both performance and power consumption.

crashnburn wrote:Vin - Thanks for the awesome input. I'd love to have some more of your insights on this front. Really appreciate it.

What would you like to know? I'm no hard drive expert, just did a ton of research before making the decision.

Vin -

If you look through the notebookreview forums, someone posted a link to a review that included real-world tests (ie. not synthetic) and the 7200.4 is actually a tad slower than the Scorpio Blue.

Isnt the Scorpio Blue 5400 RPM drive?
It would be nice if you could link to this review. Thanks.

The good 7200 rpm drives (WD, Hitachi, Fujitsu) easily out-perform all the 5400 rpm drives. I haven't tried the 7200rpm Hitachi (either of them).

Can I conclude that:
Scorpio Blue 5400 is faster than Seagate 7200.4 ?
Scorpio Blue 5400 is slower than WD, Hitachi, Fujitsu 7200 rpm drives ?

I installed a Seagate 7200.4 in my X60 last week. After doing some of the same research and coming to the conclusion that I wanted to avoid a vibrating hard drive in a small form factor notebook like the H1N1 flu so I went for the 250G Seagate.

Out of the last 6 or so model TP's I've owned the first thing that goes in after the box is opened is a 7200 rpm HD.

The Seagate is definately nice with no real noticable vibration, no heat or noise issues so far.

Well worth the price in IMHO.

What about performance? Is it really faster than an usual 5400RPM drive (such as Seagate Momentus 5400.6)? As I already reported, after the upgrade my system become more noisy with barely noticeable performance improvements.
So I definitely intend to go back to a 5400rpm drive. Although, I cannot decide whether to take Seagete or WD scorpio blue.

Completely agree with Kyocera, there's no vibrations/humming here to detect and this is even the two-platter 500 GB version. It is a good deal more quiet than the 7200.1 100 GB that came with the T60p.

Hitachi drives are also nice, but in my short experience they have the worst vibration of them all. The 7K60 in my T42 vibrates a lot, and so does my external P7K500 (albeit 3.5" - but much more than the WDs Green series i've also tried).

For raw performance and transfering of large files: Seagate Momentus 7200.4
For best perforamce with smaller files: WD Scorpio Blue, which is more or less equal the 7200.4 in this regard, but it potentially saves battery and can be found cheaper.

The water is kinda muddied regarding the 7200.4, since the first firmware it had was, let's say "bad", and a lot of faulty drives was the result. It took Seagate something like 5 months to release the drive with the good firmware. So far i haven't heard of any complaints about it. So be very careful when seeing reviews and benchmarks.
The 7200.4 is mainly limited by controller I/O performance, which is not as good as those seen from WD atleast, in terms of throughput.
Also, the Hitachi Travelstar 7K500 has just been released, so it may be very hard to find, still. I have not seen any reviews of it, but it's something to keep in mind.

To be completely honest, i think most benchmarks are more or less bogus, whether they are synthetic or not. Sure one drive might transfer a mixed set of files of 10 GB aoute 5 seconds faster. Will anyone notice? Most certainly no.

Troels wrote:To be completely honest, i think most benchmarks are more or less bogus, whether they are synthetic or not. Sure one drive might transfer a mixed set of files of 10 GB aoute 5 seconds faster. Will anyone notice? Most certainly no.

I think you're definately right. My reason for always getting a 7200 is to at least try and make sure I eliminate all bottlenecks in the system, and that issue that always comes up in one's mind "[censored] if I only had a 7200. "

Well, the Seagete noise turned out to be a way too disturbing. I decided to sell the Seagate and already ordered WD Scorpio blue. Hope this drive will be less noisy and more power efficient. For a while I returned to my stock Fujitsu 5400RPM. Although it is a bit slower it is almost impossible to hear it working.

I cloned my old 80GB Hitachi HDD to a new 250GB Seagate Momentus 7200.4 HDD; the problem is that the new drive doesn't feel faster and the HD Tune test looks terrible. What do you think? A defective unit?

Yes, it was a faulty unit but being under warranty, it was replaced with a new one; this time the HD Tune test looks good, very good - 79MB/s average.