Thinkpads Forum

It is really FAST, VERY FAST and it consumes less power than the 100GB model, my previous 100GB was 5V 1.1A the new one 200GB is 5V .88A, amazing, it also comes with 16MB cache, very good drive, and it is QUIET QUIET,

What thinkpad model do you have?. I have an X61s with the 60GB 5400 rpm. I was thinking about upgrading to what you have. Was it easy to install?. Can you provide steps, I'm not tech savvy at all. Also, does the ThinkVantage still works when you swap out the HD.

Can you post a link to where you bought the hard drive?.

Thanks

tinman1412 wrote:What thinkpad model do you have?. I have an X61s with the 60GB 5400 rpm. I was thinking about upgrading to what you have. Was it easy to install?. Can you provide steps, I'm not tech savvy at all. Also, does the ThinkVantage still works when you swap out the HD.

Can you post a link to where you bought the hard drive?.

Thanks

Hi, I have an X60, you can buy it anywhere, Newegg, Buy.com, Zipzoomfly, etc., to change the HD is very easy, just replace it with the old one, cover in the right side.

Can you quantify "QUIET QUIET"? What is your background noise level like? Where do you live?

Mind sharing how much you paid for your drive?

qviri wrote:Can you quantify "QUIET QUIET"? What is your background noise level like? Where do you live?

I do not have something to measure the noise, but just comparing to my previous 100GB 7200RPM HD I would say it makes 1/3 of the noise

Wangta wrote:Mind sharing how much you paid for your drive?

$220 shipped

I can't wait until SSDs come down in price just a bit more. I don't need lots of space on my notebook (I have lots of storage space on my HTPC for media files) but the amazing speed, no noise, and low power draw from a 32GB SSD would be so sweet.

I don't know much about SSDs so could someone please tell me how much faster compared to say 5400 rpm drives the SSD are? And what is their life expectancy? Any other drawbacks beside high price tags?

jamess wrote:I don't know much about SSDs so could someone please tell me how much faster compared to say 5400 rpm drives the SSD are? And what is their life expectancy? Any other drawbacks beside high price tags?

Read here for more info:
http://www.samsung.com/eu/Products/Semi ... ts/ssd.asp

some highlights:

Reduced Power Requirements
• No moving parts
• Super-low operating and standby power needs
• Extends battery life up to 10%

Fast Performance
• No spin up
• No seek time
• No rotational latency
• Sustained high-speed data transfers
• 56MB/s read, 32MB/s write speeds
• Can cut boot-up time in half

Reliable
• No moving parts to fail
• Greater resistance to shock & vibration
• Operates in extreme temperatures (-20° to 80°)

Improved Operation
• Noise free
• Virtually no heat emissions
• Less than half the weight of conventional hard drive

Great! Thanks for the provided url.

brosen wrote:It is really FAST, VERY FAST...

Mind running hdtach (free download) and seeing what sort of read performance it gets? It's always nice to quantify "FAST"! Thanks.

Congratulations on your new harddrive. It sounds like a great upgrade. Was your last 100 GB drive from Hitachi or from Seagate?
I have the Hitachi drive, and think it makes a fair bit of noise.

Here are the Hd Tach benchmarks:

Quick Test: http://bayimg.com/PAEFlaAbf
Long Test: http://bayimg.com/paefoaAbF
(Note: if the image quality is sub par, then click on the image after it is displayed.)

Hd Tach download: http://www.simplisoftware.com/Public/in ... est=HdTach

The numbers do not tell the visceral sense of speed one gets from these drives. Hibernate and start-from-hibernation are noticeably faster, VMware Workstation background drive activity is palpably faster, backups are faster, and the drive is absolutely silent at all times.

The 7K200 drive "feels" considerably faster (and quieter) than the 7K100, more so than the pure difference in benchmark numbers would lead one to expect. Temperature is same as 7K100.

Very impressive!

Whew!

My X61 with stock 120GB 5400RPM drive gets only 36.3MB/s average, so your 7HK200 is more than 50% faster...

$220 shipped is pretty nice (where from? Newegg is charging $255 + S/H still). About what I paid for a 200GB 4200RPM Toshiba only 4 months back...

Try http://www.costcentral.com/. Now if they only were willing to ship to Canada ...

I just received this one... but no chance to install it yet:

http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDe ... e=10005818

OP do you have benchmarks on power draw / utilization of this puppy? I'd be curious to see what impact this would have on battery VS a plain 5200 RPM.

You can find all the specs for power consumption on the Hitachi web site:
http://www.hitachigst.com/

The end result, though, is that the reduction of battery life would only be on the order of a few per cent.

tomh009 wrote:You can find all the specs for power consumption on the Hitachi web site:
http://www.hitachigst.com/

The end result, though, is that the reduction of battery life would only be on the order of a few per cent.

According to the website it burns thro 2+W on avg reads/write and has a peak of 5W on startup. Compared to a low power 5400 RPM that is almost twice the power util

OK, let's work on these numbers. Startup power really doesn't matter for battery life -- it's only for a few seconds, it really only matters when your are building RAID arrays and you need to handle multiple drives starting at once.

So let's look at read/write, performance idle and active idle, the most important states:

Doubling the size of the disk:
7K200: 2.3W, 2.0W, 1.0W
7K100: 2.0W, 1.8W, 1.1W
The difference is maybe 0.2W on average, or maybe even less -- that's 2% additional power consumption, or the loss of 5-10 minutes of battery life in exchange for an extra 100 GB.

Increasing performance:
7K200: 2.3W, 2.0W, 1.0W
5K250: 1.8W, 1.7W, 0.8W
5K160: 1.8W, N/A, 0.8W
5K100: 2.0W, N/A, 0.85W
Here the difference is that the older 5400 rpm drives did not support performance idle mode (which does consume more power). However, the difference in the other modes is again small, with battery life delta probably less than 15 minutes (depending on the system and the battery type).

Really increasing performance:
7K200: 2.3W, 2.0W, 1.0W
4K120: 1.4W, 1.25W, 0.65W

Here the difference is bigger, and you may gain 30 minutes of battery life by installing a 4200 rpm drive. But you will spend more than that 30 minutes just waiting for the hourglass to disappear!


So back to your comment ... I don't know what drive you compared to in order to get a 1.1-1.2W read performance, and active idle around 0.5W. The 7K200 will indeed use more power, but the difference is negligible in practice, and the performance is stunning ...

tomh009 wrote:OK, let's work on these numbers. Startup power really doesn't matter for battery life -- it's only for a few seconds, it really only matters when your are building RAID arrays and you need to handle multiple drives starting at once.

So let's look at read/write, performance idle and active idle, the most important states:

Doubling the size of the disk:
7K200: 2.3W, 2.0W, 1.0W
7K100: 2.0W, 1.8W, 1.1W
The difference is maybe 0.2W on average, or maybe even less -- that's 2% additional power consumption, or the loss of 5-10 minutes of battery life in exchange for an extra 100 GB.

Increasing performance:
7K200: 2.3W, 2.0W, 1.0W
5K250: 1.8W, 1.7W, 0.8W
5K160: 1.8W, N/A, 0.8W
5K100: 2.0W, N/A, 0.85W
Here the difference is that the older 5400 rpm drives did not support performance idle mode (which does consume more power). However, the difference in the other modes is again small, with battery life delta probably less than 15 minutes (depending on the system and the battery type).

Really increasing performance:
7K200: 2.3W, 2.0W, 1.0W
4K120: 1.4W, 1.25W, 0.65W

Here the difference is bigger, and you may gain 30 minutes of battery life by installing a 4200 rpm drive. But you will spend more than that 30 minutes just waiting for the hourglass to disappear!


So back to your comment ... I don't know what drive you compared to in order to get a 1.1-1.2W read performance, and active idle around 0.5W. The 7K200 will indeed use more power, but the difference is negligible in practice, and the performance is stunning ...

There is an article on anandtech/tomshardware that does a power consumption comparision across various family brands of 5400/7200. Your analysis above is commendable yet inadequate as it compares within a particular manufacturer's family but not across. I do agree with you that the earlier generations of said family weren't as power efficient as the newer and clearly faster brethren.

7K100 was the fastest drive I could get before, and 7K200 is the one now, so that's the comparison I am interested in myself.

I went to the effort of digging out the numbers for multiple Hitachi models but I will not do so for random other models. You don't mention which drive you compare to, what its power consumption is, or provide any link to a review. So I fail to find anything of substance in your post that I could respond to.

tomh009 wrote:7K100 was the fastest drive I could get before, and 7K200 is the one now, so that's the comparison I am interested in myself.

I went to the effort of digging out the numbers for multiple Hitachi models but I will not do so for random other models. You don't mention which drive you compare to, what its power consumption is, or provide any link to a review. So I fail to find anything of substance in your post that I could respond to.

Here you go:

"Performing under a full load, the 7K200 draws the same amount of power as the 7K100 -- 3 watts, a figure admittedly on the higher side when contrasted with the typical dissipation of other units. When idle, the 7K200 consumes 1.1 watts, a full 60% more than its economical predecessor. "

Source: http://www.storagereview.com/HTS722020K ... page=0%2C5
[/b]

1.1W is slightly higher than the 7K200's rated 1.0W, while the 7K100's measured 0.69W is quite a bit lower than the rated 1.1W. Some of that might be due to manufacturing variation ... but even if it's not, 0.4W will not make more than 2-4% difference in battery life.

And, to quote the conclusion from the very same review you so proudly referenced:

storagereview.com wrote:That said, the story remains the drive's single-user performance. In the end, the Hitachi Travelstar 7K200 blows away the competition by margins seldom seen in the hard drive world. Though it does not come cheaply, the Travelstar's showing is so superior to that of any other drive's that it stands as the only choice for those striving to attain true desktop-level performance from a portable system.

Is Hitachi the only vendor that provide 16MB cache drive? I searched both Western Digital & Seagate only have 8MB cache for their drives.

On the Newegg.com site, one reviewer said that this drive does not support Windows XP and would only work with Vista. Is this true? Thanks.


Mark


Newegg Quote:
Cons: Doesnt support Windows XP , which means it works only for Vista

... one reviewer said that this drive does not support Windows XP and would only work with Vista ....

Absolute nonsense, but it is easy to explain why somebody might make the mistake of believing that such is the case.

What happened most likely is that the reviewer tried to install Windows XP "out of the box" or tried to run it on this SATA drive with the machine's BIOS in SATA Mode rather than Compatibility Mode. Windows XP does not "know" about SATA drives unless one explicitly provides it the SATA drivers. The solution is to set the BIOS SATA parameter to Compatibility Mode or provide the SATA drivers at Windows XP install time or after the machine has booted into Windows XP in Compatibility Mode. Here are the SATA drivers for Windows XP:
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... MIGR-62909