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Conclusion: 500 GB Notebook Drives are Still Unbalanced
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We have seen several new records during the testing for this review. Hitachi and Samsung are the first to offer 500GB hard drives in the notebook space. Samsung breaks a throughput record by getting close to 80 MB/s with the HM500LI. However, it also reached a negative record in the access time tests with a slow 19 ms. That said, Hitachi’s drives aren’t really much faster in this respect.
Although both drives have their strengths and weaknesses, it appears to us as if both manufacturers raced to the 500GB capacity point and jeopardized the balance among performance, capacity and energy efficiency somewhere along the way. While Samsung squeezes amazing transfer rates out of the standard 2.5“ form factor, the slow access time and 10-25% increase in power consumption is not acceptable for a system hard drive. Hitachi, on the other end, cannot yet fit its 500GB drives into a 9.5 mm drive bay, and the throughput and access times aren’t impressive, though certainly fast enough.
We have to conclude that we have higher expectations from new hard drives. A new product should not perform worse than its predecessor, which is the case for Samsung. Hence we can only recommend these drives for pure storage applications; in the case of Samsung, it’s because of the high power requirements and slow access times, and in the case of Hitachi due to the 12.5 mm height, which disqualifies it as a system drive for high-end notebooks.
Related Articles:
2.5“ HDD Galore: Samsung, Seagate, Toshiba Drives for 2008
Hitachi Travelstar 7K200 and 5K250 Hit the Band
Seagate Momentus 5400.2 FDE: Data Encryption on a Drive
WD and Toshiba Join the 320GB 2.5“ HDD Club
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Questions? Ask Tom's community!
The article says there is a 2.5" 320GB PATA drive - what is it? The largest I've seen is the WD2500BEVE.
TYPO:: Your article mistakenly say Hitachi Deskstar when it should say; "Hitachi Travelstar", all throughout all the benchmark results...
Terry, I too have not heard of a laptop drive larger than 250GB that is PATA.
Samsung has now brought down the height back down to 9.5 mm at this capacity point.
-_-
Platters 2 3 3
shouldn't it be 2 for the Samsung?
and
Interface SATA 3 Gb/s SATA 3 Gb/s SATA 3 Gb/s
shouldn't it be 1.5 for the Samsung?
Patrick and Achim,
try setting the drives to sata 1.5gbs instead of 3.0. the single drives do not need that much interface bandwidth, but the 3.0 interface uses more power.
Terry--you are absolutely correct. Reference fixed to reflect your observation.
Dan--We're fixing the charts right now and will have them updated as soon as they are ready.
Magic--Axed the redundant "down"
Hrod--according to the story's author Samsung's original launch documentation said 2 platters and 1.5 Gb/s. It has since been fixed and everything in the piece updated to reflect that the Spinpoint is actually a three-platter device with a 3 Gb/s interface.
Thank you for the feedback guys!
Guys why arent these HDD's on the charts, they have been reviewed by you and are close to the 2nd and 3rd fastest disks...?
http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] 776-8.html
comparable chart found here
http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] 776-5.html
It would be nice if the Samsung drive wasn't such a power hog - I would love to have a fast 500GB drive in something like a HP mininote for using as a portable movie player. But getting 1.5TB raid 0 in a Clevo D900 now doesn't sound bad either...
A nice detailed review as usual.
Any chance that you could do a review of 2.5" 7200rpm 320GB HDDs. I believe Hitachi, Seagate, Western Digital, and Samsung all have them now. I'm waiting for someone to do a comprehensive review before buying one to upgrade my laptop. I would think that Hitachi's might be the fastest given the performance of the 7k200, but I've been hearing good things about the WD 320GB Black so I guess we'll see.
Two errors: the opening paragraph claims that Samsung's 500 GB drive uses two platters, when it actually uses three (however, the detail page for this product gets it right).
Also, 12.5mm was not the "initial" height of laptop drives -- there was a point in time when those were considered the slim ones, as there were 17mm and 19mm height drives before them (I used SCSI models in my PowerBook). Searching for "19mm laptop drive" will verify this.
How long do you think it will take for these issues to get worked out?
- Seeking the best performance 500GB drive for my MacBook Pro ASAP!