Three 7200 RPM Notebook Hard Drives For 2011
Table of contents
- 1. More Capacity, More Speed
- 2. Samsung Spinpoint MP4 (640 GB, HM640JJ)
- 3. Seagate Momentus 7200.5 (750 GB, ST9750420AS)
- 4. Western Digital Scorpio Black (500 GB, WD5000BEKT)
- 5. Test Setup And Throughput Diagrams
Hard drives aren’t dead yet! And they won’t die out anytime soon. The latest 2.5” drives for notebooks deliver relatively high performance and ample storage for little money.
Five hundred, 640, and now 750 GB. Three quarters of a terabyte are now available at the most important 9.5 mm height on the 2.5” format. This is the form factor that is utilized in more than 95% of all laptop and notebook designs, including most netbooks. We got the latest 7200 RPM drives from Samsung, Seagate, and Western Digital for a shootout.
With all of the buzz in storage gravitating around SSDs, everything seems to be quiet in the hard drive space. While solid state drives have, in fact, long overtaken hard drives in terms of high performance and low power consumption, mainstream buyers are still a long ways away from swapping over to large SSDs. The cost per gigabyte is simply too high still. Moreover, they do not provide sufficient storage capacity for consumers (or at least for what consumers many times believe they should be able to store). The truth is that 500 gigabytes look far better than 64 or 128 GB to folks who think they have, or will have, gobs of digital data. But the truth is also that a notebook with a hard drive may very well provide sufficient performance for non-enthusiasts.
Making that choice always requires a balance between what you need and, more importantly, what you expect. More folks are familiar with common performance limiters, like insufficient memory, too-slow of a CPU, or an inadequate graphics processor. The issue of limited hard drive performance is less-easily diagnosed. But once you spend some time on a system armed with an SSD, you won't want to switch back to mechanical storage. Unfortunately, this remains but a wish for many folks, as price tags are great for forcing us back to earth.
In this light, conventional notebook hard drives that spin at 7200 RPM are still quite a good choice, as the throughput of almost 120 MB/s (~60 MB/s minimum) is not bad in the greater scheme of things. As long as you have a decent amount of system memory (4 GB or more nowadays), the number of heavy-use situations where a hard drive limits performance should be kept to a minimum. And in exchange, you get access to a lot more free space: 500, 640, or 750 GB on the latest product generation. With that in mind, which of the three newest mobile drives is best?
Related Stories :
- Notebook Hard Drives: 750GB And 640GB Models Reviewed
- 9.5 Versus 12.5 mm: Which Notebook HDD Is Right For You?
- Samsung First To Ship 500 GB Notebook HDD
- SanDisk Introduces FlashBack Adapter As Notebook HDD Backup
- Fujitsu prepares 200 GB, 2.5" notebook HDD, but will it perform better?
- Samsung Intros 2-Platter 1TB HDD for Notebooks
- WD Ships 750 GB 7200RPM HDD for Notebooks
- Seagate Hybrid-HDD-SSD Unveiled for Notebooks
7200rpm..... speed for these devices doesnt really matter at all anymore - its either SSD, or it aint (performance wise)
I have the spinpoint mp4 and am very happy with it.
Interesting report. You're right, $200 or more for a fast ssd is too expensive for most pc users. For the time being I have a difficult time justifying the cost.
Regardless of how fast the 7200 rpm hard drives are I have absolutely no plans of ever buying one of these (unless I come across the rare situation where I just have to have huge file storage capabilities for my laptop that cannot go on my file server).
I can and will wait until the cost of a 128GB SSD is $1/GB (needs to be one with a good controller not some crappy jmicron controller).
So until the day comes I will just sit and wait.
Well, I can assure you that the caviar black is available in 750GB capacity.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6822136835
I have been considering replacing my 3 750GB 3.5" drives with 4 7200rpm laptop drives for better performance with lower power requirements. Would you guys ever do a story on such things? The Samsung looks promising for this purpose. I know the server space is going this way for the same reasons. Why wouldn't desktop DIY go the same way?
oops, the post above should be Scorpio Black in 750 capacity.
Hmm is that the case... So lets say someone has a ton of games music and movies, you actualy think its viable to use ssd's?
Ill take my hardware raid 5 of 4- 2tb drives anyday for all my storage needs( which btw puts out more than most ssd's). SSD's only are really viable as a OS drive for the cost,
Not to mention nobody needs over 300mb/s for a video game/movies or music. Only thing that needs that kind of output are professional programs
Hmm is that the case... So lets say someone has a ton of games music and movies, you actualy think its viable to use ssd's?Ill take my hardware raid 5 of 4- 2tb drives anyday for all my storage needs( which btw puts out more than most ssd's). SSD's only are really viable as a OS drive for the cost, Not to mention nobody needs over 300mb/s for a video game/movies or music. Only thing that needs that kind of output are professional programs
The big difference there is access time. Believe me, WoW loads up faster from my single Vertex 120GB drive (at 200MB/s) than it does from my 3X 750GB Caviar Black raid array (300MB/s). The system boots in about the same amount of time (about 15 seconds) with either, so I use the raid array for my boot drive, but my games are loaded on my SSD.
I can and will wait until the cost of a 128GB SSD is $1/GB (needs to be one with a good controller not some crappy jmicron controller). So until the day comes I will just sit and wait.
Be prepared to wait a long, long time. As long as hard drives are manufactured, SSD pricing is not going to go down much more. Come back in about 5 years and NAND + latest controller might net you $1/GB on a retail SSD.
I'm surprised by the Seagate XT hybrid. It sucks.
Which one of these puppies should I slap into my PS3? However, I am contemplating on just putting an OCZ 90GB SSD for quicker access to the sludging GT5 game. I don't care for space, I want improved performance over the current fat 60GB drive in there.
Which one of these puppies should I slap into my PS3? However, I am contemplating on just putting an OCZ 90GB SSD for quicker access to the sludging GT5 game. I don't care for space, I want improved performance over the current fat 60GB drive in there.
Even the modern 5400rpm drives will be faster than the original 60GB drive from the PS3. With a PS3 fat I wouldn't use a 7200rpm anyways, 5400rpm or SSD only for temperature and fan noise reasons.
Most of the time a HDD/SDD just needs to be fast enough to load data/files/programs into RAM before it's needed by the system. Getting a few extra seconds faster boot or game level upload isn't that important to most people to justify the premium cost of a SSD.
Well, I can assure you that the caviar black is available in 750GB capacity.
Yeah, the story that they were released was a few weeks ago (Jan05 2011). It seems though to ask for drives to review might have taken a bit of time from the testing and review of the hardware though.
3 weeks is not insubstantial, but they might want to have updated the story "750gb was not available at the time of testing".
What firmware are you using with the XT drive?
Ive played wow, loading off a single WD black drive, and load time were very small even with that, Shaving 2 seconds off a already low load time just doesnt matter to me.
So unless that small 1-2 seconds really matter to you, having a hdd raid array is a much better solution, as i dont see the fast access time dropping a already low load time that much lower.
Also (thanks to steam) the amount of games i have just isnt suited to using a small ssd drive.
One point, slightly less than 90% of laptop owners dont' upgrade/replace the original drive.
Also, FYI.. netbooks won't see a 320gb drive let along 640 or 750gb in 2011.
Lets see 12 second boot time versus 1 min 20 second. First to load in online games or middle of the road to last. 2 seconds to load Photoshop versus 7-10 seconds. I'll take the SSD route thanks. 355 Write 275 read speeds owns mechanical drives all day long, cost more yeh but I can do that. 7200 rpm drives are falling by the wayside except for your casual ignorant pc users..ie people that buy their PCs at Walmart and only browse the net and email.
Must be nice to have Daddy's gold card to pay for your spending habits.
Owning a 150GB WD raptor and a 640 Cav Black here I can say that a 20sec boot time (once i get past ASUS's retarded long boot up sequence) to desktop with Win 7 on the Raptor, vs 12 seconds isn't going to warrant me to switch over any time soon on that front. Also how many games does it honestly matter loading the level first when there's a 30 - 60 round start timer? (Anyone that plays BAD company 2, Black ops, TF2, DoW2, ect can vouch for this. Either you wait or you wait for the timer to expire or the map to load and have 5 sec on the timer to wait out.)
SSDs are great, but the price is still steep as hell for one compared to a RAID array.
Oh and BTW Kingstons 16 GB SSD is heaven for a cheap netbook upgrade.
Yeah, except it is hard to jam a raid array into your notebook.
I want a conventional 750GB 7200RPM drive with 40-60GB of SSD built into it that appears as a single drive partitioned into a 40-60GB partition and a 750GB partition.
That way my OS and core apps (Adobe products and 3DS Max) can go into the SSD part and the apps into the traditional HDD and I only need one drive in my laptop, rather than having to remove the optical drive or have an external HDD. The momentus XT is pointless, give it 40GB or SS and I'll bite.