W500 with Hitachi Travelstar 320GB experience?

[Hackster]

Hi, all,

Does anyone have the Hitachi Travelstar 320GB drive (model 0A57547) in your W500? I am trying to choose between this one and WD Scorpio Black 320GB drive (WD3200BEKT). The price is the same, I had good experience with Hitachi in my T42p, so I am leaning to the Travelstar. Any advice?

Thanks.

[ZaZ]

Pick one and go with it. They're all very similar. I kind of like Seagate drives because it allows you a free download of DiscWizard from Seagate's website. DiscWizard is a limited version of True Image, which I use in place of Rescue and Recovery.

[Hackster]

Pick one and go with it...

Yes, this is exactly what I am going to do... unless I hear something that will make my decision more then a coin toss.

[tomh009]

I'm very happy with the Hitachi 5K500.B in my X200s -- with the high data density, it's almost as fast as the 7200 rpm drives, and the .B models are even quieter and use less power than the earlier ones. (Also good experience with many prior Hitachi drives.)

[ZaZ]

It's the seek times, not the throughput, which will make a 7200RPM drive seem faster for every day usage.

[tomh009]

It's the seek times, not the throughput, which will make a 7200RPM drive seem faster for every day usage.

Seek times are not affected by the rotational speed; seek time is the time to reposition the head on the disk so you can start reading. After that the rotational speed kicks in for the data transfer rate.

In any case, the 7K320 is rated at 12 ms for the average seek time, and the 5K500.B has an identical rating, so most likely the two use the same head movement mechanism.

[ZaZ]

Whether you want to call it seek times or redundancy cycles misses the point. For typical usage like Office or Internet, a 7200RPM drive will usually seem faster because it is able to find things quicker, even if the throughput is similar or the same. Saying the 5k500 is almost as fast as the 7200RPM drives based on the throughput is only part of the picture. That's been my experience anyway. Take it for what it's worth, which probably ain't much.

[archer6]

Hi, all,

Does anyone have the Hitachi Travelstar 320GB drive (model 0A57547) in your W500? I am trying to choose between this one and WD Scorpio Black 320GB drive (WD3200BEKT). The price is the same, I had good experience with Hitachi in my T42p, so I am leaning to the Travelstar. Any advice?

Thanks.

Greetings and Welcome to the Forum!
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I have done a lot of hard drive comparisons over the last six months, just to see what the different drives are like. Having used Travelstars for years, I was looking to branch out and try something new in conventional drives as well as SSD's. Since I work with large files the first drive I put in my new W500 was the 320GB Hitachi you are asking about. It ran just like the other Travelstars, it's a good drive. Next up I tried both the 320GB WD Scorpio Blue & Black drives. The Black is noticeably faster than the Blue and very quiet as compared to the Travelstar. In fact both WD drives are very quiet. Next I tried Seagates relatively new drive, but experienced some clicking. I sent it back in exchange for another and it also clicks, so this must be a normal characteristic of their drives. However that said, I should note that most people would probably not notice as it's very subtle and can only be heard in a very quiet environment. During a normal business day the ambient noise level prevents one from hearing it. Also I have very acute hearing and I'm very picky about noise and heat. I'm sure the Seagate is a good drive. I used both the WD & Seagate drives for two weeks to give them a fair trial and ended up choosing the WD Black. It's the fastest (for what I do), the quietest and coolest. And although the margins are small it's clearly superior in back to back tests in the same W500. I hope this info is helpful to you.
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Cheers
posted via BlackBerry Bold

[tomh009]

Whether you want to call it seek times or redundancy cycles misses the point. For typical usage like Office or Internet, a 7200RPM drive will usually seem faster because it is able to find things quicker, even if the throughput is similar or the same. Saying the 5k500 is almost as fast as the 7200RPM drives based on the throughput is only part of the picture. That's been my experience anyway. Take it for what it's worth, which probably ain't much.

With hard drives, there are two physical movements: the spinning of the disk, and the radial movement of the head. The former is measured by rotational speed, and primarily affects throughput. The latter is measured using access times, independent of the rotational speed, and impacts the wait until the disk head is positioned and can start reading the data. A disk can have high throughput but slow access times or vice versa -- these are not necessarily connected, though a good drive will do well in both.

Addiitonally increases in data density (more GB on fewer platters, given the same form factor) increase the throughput independent of the rotational speed.

As an example, that 5K500.B has 500GB on two double-sided platters, or 125GB per side. At 5400 rpm, its media transfer rate is 875 Mb/s. The older 5K160 also has the same rotational speed and the same number of platters, but only 40GB per side. It's rated at 540 Mb/s, very close to the 500 Mb/s that would be predicted by dividing the 5K500.B's transfer rate by the square root of the ratio of densities.

By the way of comparison, the older 7K200 7200 rpm drive has a data transfer rate of 876 Mb/s (essentially identical to the 5K500.B) and a seek time of 10 ms (2 ms faster than the 5K500.B -- and than the newer 7K320).

[Hackster]

archer6, thanks for the welcome and the exhaustive review of the 320GB options! I hope others will also fnd this information useful.

[Nalim]

Hi, all,

Does anyone have the Hitachi Travelstar 320GB drive (model 0A57547) in your W500? I am trying to choose between this one and WD Scorpio Black 320GB drive (WD3200BEKT). The price is the same, I had good experience with Hitachi in my T42p, so I am leaning to the Travelstar. Any advice?

Thanks.

Go with Hitachi drive. It has much better thermal characteristics...

[archer6]

Go with Hitachi drive. It has much better thermal characteristics...

Very interesting. That's contrary to my experience with many Hitachis. While they run well and reasonably cool, it's all relative. Compared to the WD _and_ the Seagate both of which are newer drives, the Hitachis run warmer. And while I don't have the specifics right here in front of me, I make this statement having measuring the temps with an IR temp gun during testing. Therefore it's not just a guess. Working purely from memory, I remember the temp in the center of the keyboard being about 4 to 7 degrees cooler, and the center of the hard drive where it's located on the bottom of the computer being cooler by about the same amount. So it's not earth shattering, but they do run cooler. And don't get me wrong I really like Hitachi drives and have had no problems with them, I simply tried WD & Seagate as something new to explore. In the end the WD Black proved to be the best.

Cheers...

[tomh009]

Very interesting. That's contrary to my experience with many Hitachis. While they run well and reasonably cool, it's all relative. Compared to the WD _and_ the Seagate both of which are newer drives, the Hitachis run warmer. And while I don't have the specifics right here in front of me, I make this statement having measuring the temps with an IR temp gun during testing. Therefore it's not just a guess. Working purely from memory, I remember the temp in the center of the keyboard being about 4 to 7 degrees cooler, and the center of the hard drive where it's located on the bottom of the computer being cooler by about the same amount. So it's not earth shattering, but they do run cooler. And don't get me wrong I really like Hitachi drives and have had no problems with them, I simply tried WD & Seagate as something new to explore. In the end the WD Black proved to be the best.

I use a lower-effort method for this -- I look at the power consumption figures in the manufacturers' specifications. Basically all the consumed power is turned into heat (remember the law of conservation of energy) apart from a tiny bit being emitted as heat, so the power consumption numbers will correlate very well with heat. Of course, the specific part of the drive radiating the heat will vary for different manufacturers' designs.

So let's take a look at the read/write and idle power for current 7200 rpm drives:

• Hitachi 7K320: 1.8W/1.0W*
• Seagate Momentus 7200.4 320GB**: (not specified)/0.67W
• WD Scorpio Black 320GB: 2.5W/0.85W

* low-power idle
** 500GB has same specifications
And for 5400 rpm drives:

• Hitachi 5K500.B: 1.4W/0.8W
• Seagate Momentus 5400.6 500GB: 2.6W/0.81W
• WD Scorpio Blue 500GB: 2.5W/0.85W

* low-power idle

Based on these ... the Seagate and WD look good on the 7200 rpm models, though the lak of read/write power spec for Seagate is suspicious. The Hitachi might work out better if the drive is highly active, but if it's mostly idle, the WD and Seagate will generate less heat.

For the 5400 rpm drives, the Hitachi has hands-down lowest power usage, though, (40% less power for read/write) and will surely run cooler than the other two.

[archer6]

That just proves that _I did_ drop the temp gun on the pavement one too many times on track day....heh! Just the excuse I needed to buy a new one
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Thanks!
Oh....and yes I concur, your method is a good one. Very smart!
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Cheers....
posted via BlackBerry Bold

[Pocket Aces]

I have a Scorpio Black in my Thinkpad and I am very satisfied.

[Hackster]

Thanks all for your input. The neighbourhood computer store rolled the dice for me - when I went there they had Hitachi on sale, so I went with it. So far I am happy with it. It is quiet and cool. It also seems quite fast, but I don't know if Vista+TurboMemory get any credit for this...
Thanks again.

[mdjtlj]

Greetings,

I've got a Hitachi Travelstar 320GB (7200rpm) as the primary drive and a Seagate 500GB (7200rpm) in the UltraBay. Have not have a preoblem with either of them.

The only problem that I do have is battery life, but this is due to my refusal to turn down the brightness of the display on flights and added to the heavy use of SQL Server and Visual Studio, it not surprising, but most likely not caused by the drives.

[agarza]

I have the single platter 250GB 5K500.B on my Thinkpad and I think it's even quieter than any other dual-platter 5K500.B (less moving parts).

7K500 was just launched and the Read/Write / Active Idle Specs are:
1.8W/1.0W
Its performance is up to 1245MB/s media transfer rate. WD still does not announce their 500GB 7200RPM model.