Conclusion
Hitachi and Toshiba had a few more months than Seagate to work on their 500GB 7,200 RPM notebook hard drives, and both did a great job. The Travelstar 7K500 delivers up to 108 MB/s, which is an all-time high throughput result for notebook drives. Toshiba is only slightly behind at 107 MB/s peak. The results are similarly high for writes, and both drives beat their competition, including Seagate’s Momentus 7200.4. Here is our overall performance index:
Our performance index weighs throughput with 50%, PCMark Vantage with 25%, and I/O performance with 25%. The result is clear: the 7,200 RPM drives come out on top. The two newcomers in particular are quite superior at this time. Toshiba is the best choice if you want applications and Windows to start as quickly as possible. Hitachi wins when it comes to handling media, and the 7K500 turns out to be slightly lower on power consumption.
The differences in power consumption are actually worth mentioning, since the gap between the most and least efficient drives has become rather small. There are disciplines in which some drives don’t do as well, but the power consumption ranges have almost aligned. Mainstream drives idle at around 0.7W to 0.9W while the performance drives we reviewed all require roughly 1W in idle. Activity power varies from a bit above idle for limited requirements, such as video playback, to around 3W for peak performance scenarios, such as maximum streaming. Seeing significantly less than 1W idle power for 7,200 RPM notebook hard drives is as unlikely as peak power consumption exceeding 3W. As long as drives are within this range, you shouldn’t spend too much time thinking about power consumption. Real-life differences will be minor.
Your drive selection should mainly be guided by performance and cost as long as no drive manages to introduce significant advantages in power consumption. This review shows that getting one of the two latest drive models, the Hitachi Travelstar 7K500 or Toshiba’s MK5056GSY, is what you want to do. It’s time for Seagate to release a Momentus 7200.5 and for WD to update the Scorpio Black family. The only other option is an SSD, which cost-wise is still out of range at these high capacities.
Update: Since this story was written, Seagate has done one-better and launched its Momentus XT 2.5" drive, which we reviewed.
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Can you also benchmark the noise level next time? I prefer a quiet PC :x
Can you also benchmark the noise level next time? I prefer a quiet PC :x
these are laptop drives so by nature they make very little noise.
wonder how is the performance when put 2 7K500 on RAID 0 compare to the 3.5" 7200RPM HDD
Great to see more variety at 500GB.
Nice article, except for the Vantage benchmark, i hope someday Tomshardware drop that type of benchmarks (same in games articles).
The WD7500BPVT from Western Digital has a 9.5mm height, not 12.5mm as you had mentioned as being non-standard. Whereas the WD10TPVT has a 12.5mm height. I also personally own a WD7500BPVT, and it works great in my 15" MacBook Pro Spring 2009 Model.
Why these drives aren’t 640GB? Clearly they are using two 320GB platters so 640GB is the max size and not 500GB.
HUH?!!?!? why is this news? I've had the Hitachi 7K500 (HTS725050A9A364) for over 4 month now, how is this news?!!?!
Hey, why didn't you include the Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid in your charts? Would make it much easier to compare! Thanks.
no one ever benchmarks temperatures. you should do that.
Hmmm. So are these 4096 Byte sector drives?
Western Digital WD6400BEVT is a 640G drive according to WD. All the charts have it at 500G.
Temperatures don't affect hdd life except at the extremes.
nor do they effect it
Drive selection should be guided not by performance or cost but by reliability. Any extra megabyte per second or a few dollars off is nothing if the drive fails after a few months. For example the current Seagate drives have big reliability problems (check out user reviews on Newegg).
and how do u benchmark reliability?
Yes sir there are lots of things you can read on their web site but how reliable they are no one can tell until you bought one and it fails.
As I said, check out user reviews on Newegg. Newegg lists users who bought that particular product from them so you know they're not bogus reviews. If a Seagate drive has 20% one-egg (worst rating) reviews and Samsung drive has 8% one-egg reviews, that says a lot about the quality and reliability of the drives. Of course this only works for popular products but it's better than simply hoping you're buying a reliable drive.
My Hp Dv7 came with two MK5056GSY (raid 0) they are very impressive no vibrations to speak of and extremely quite as well I should mention that HP does have jell cushions on each contact point but very impressive.
I've been looking for the best/most reliable 2.5" 500Gb 7200rpm hard drive for my MacBook Pro. After all of that research the Toshiba sounds like a very solid hard drive. Still, it's only been out for a month or two (7/19/10) So I just can't be sure. I was about to grab the Momentus Xt, but I'm scared after hearing some of the reviews about reliability.
I am using this drive in the Macbook Pro 991. just upgraded two days ago. working great! silent and love it's speed. Friends of mine keep having problems with Seagate and WD.