New: Hitachi Travelstar 7K500
Hitachi’s Travelstar 7K500 is flagship in the company's high-performance lineup today. It's still a 7,200 RPM drive based on the standard 9.5mm z-height. It still has only a 16MB buffer and a SATA 3.0 Gb/s interface. However, the drive's insides are entirely different. Hitachi increased the maximum capacity from 200GB to 320GB (Travelstar 7K320) to 500GB. If you don’t need that much storage on the road, you can still select 320, 250, 160, or 120GB capacities.
While the 7K200 had two model families that differed only in their interface type, the Travelstar 7K500 is available in three different varieties. I just mentioned the standard models, but these are also available with an optional bulk disk encryption (BDE) feature. BDE utilizes on-drive, hardware-based encryption of all disk contents, as per the Trusted Computing Group’s Opal specification. In addition, there's the "Enhanced Availability" family, modified to withstand continuous 24x7 operation. Note that the EA series lacks a 120GB offering, and there are presently no EA drives with BDE.
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What about going straigth for a SSD... How about having a look at that for an updated version..
Using an old hard drive as a backup solution is precisely what you do not want to do. What's next, using your old micro-disks as a backup for your HD backup?
I searched in vain for the SSD option. I think most laptop users would like faster boot times and lower power consumption, rather than more storage space.
Then there is the robustness of an SSD compared to mechanical disks.
lamorpa, there is a HUGE difference in using a perfectly good 1 year old hard drive as a backup and using one that is 10 years old. Many people will be replacing fairly new drives with larger faster ones and thes drives would be perfect for use in a usb enclosure.
I agree with da Rev. There is no harm in using a drive that is a few years old for a backup solution. Think about it...backup once a week or even once a month, for the rest of that time, the hard drive is off! It's very unlikely your main drive AND the backup will die at the same time.
I'm running a WD1200BEVS (120GB, 5400RPM) and bought a WD3200BEVT (320BG, 7200RPM). I have an old Gateway MX6920 notebook. I've tried installing this 320GB with no luck. Is there a restriction based on HD capacity or speed that may be causing my problems? I'm about to try Tom's Hardware method above now that I've upgraded to Windows 7. But i'd like to know if there are restrictions anyway
I'm running a WD1200BEVS (120GB, 5400RPM) and bought a WD3200BEKT (320BG, 7200RPM). I have an old Gateway MX6920 notebook. I've tried installing this 320GB with no luck. Is there a restriction based on HD capacity or speed that may be causing my problems? I'm about to try Tom's Hardware method above now that I've upgraded to Windows 7. But i'd like to know if there are restrictions anyway
Wow, so replacing an 7200 rpm drive withanother one does not give you performance benefits? Of course it does not, you should not expect it.
However, if you took an old 5400 rpm hd (most laptops come with these drives), and repalced it with 7200, you WOULD see a BIG difference. Trust me, I've just done it on the 2 years old sony vaio, and you can see how much faster the drive is.
Yes, its always good to maximize your laptop/netbook to the max before changing it. If you can max out the RAM and get a decent amount of HDD space out of it, then why not before replacing your system?
How is this benchmark at all surprising? They basically compared an old hard drive to a new hard drive that had the same RPM?
Exactly, cpatel1987. This is a frustrating article because the first few pages were spent discussing all the performance increases in hard drive technology, with the implied expectation that it should make for a noticeable performance boost, but that never seemed likely to me. I guess it's good to see some proof that a newer drive is not really faster than an older one just because the bus bandwidth is higher, but there's not much value beyond that.
There is a speed benifit to be had. When you have an older smaller hard drive, you tend to end up too low on free space, this slows down your computer. You won't notice this benifit on a fresh install. But after you have been using it for a year or two, the computer with the newer larger HD will be faster.
[citation][nom]actionjksn[/nom]There is a speed benefit to be had. When you have an older smaller hard drive, you tend to end up too low on free space, this slows down your computer. You won't notice this benefit on a fresh install. But after you have been using it for a year or two, the computer with the newer larger HD will be faster. My wife's two year old Lenovo had an 80 gig Hitachi hard drive, I replaced it with a Western digital 320 gig. It is now much faster. Because her free space was below 70 percent, Windows runs better with more free space. Another advantage to a larger size is you have more programs close to the outer parts of the platters
Although in Greek, this article is more interesting:
http://oem.gr/main/index.php?optio [...] mitstart=2
At least default 2.5" 5400rpm HDD was replaced by an Apacer SSD! ;D
A key performance optimization technique that was not talked about is this: Get the largest 7200rpm hard drive that you can afford for the upgrade and partition it into three partitions so that one takes advantage of the fact that "outer" partitions are accessed much faster than "inner" partitions. Partition a 500GB drive into (1) a small 80GB C: drive for storing only Windows OS and programs, (2) a ~200GB D: for storing all data, then finally (3) assign the remaining 220GB into a E: "spare" partition that is basically not used. The C: partition will be fastest as it uses the most outer parts of the disk platters, with D: being next fastest. Accessing the inner parts of the disk platters (which E: uses) can be as much as 25% slower. This is also a good data integrity safeguard as one's data is partitioned off from the OS/programs. Finally, a further optimization technique is to create a very small partition used strictly for Windows swap/temp file and scratch/temp by programs such as Photoshop, etc.
forget HDD's - time to get SSD's!
Just another dynamic duo article to fill the page quota...
The 7k200 was a great drive a few years ago - still is even now. Replacing a slow 5k4 with a 7k2 one was/is revealing, but a newer 7k2 will mostly have just a significantly higher linear transfer speed, hardly useful for most workloads.
A neglected aspect is that in a family of drives there are some performance variations. For the 7k200, the best were the 100 and 200GB ones.
Another important aspect is the interface: SATA150 is less power hungry than SATA300 (the latter one is hardly necessary for today's laptop HDDs). Also PATA is more energy efficient than SATA - serdes burns at least 1W, by itself.
Here's my take on this.. as long as laptops can function on usb flash drives (starting @ 128gb of course).. there will soon not be a need for internal hard drives. For BIG storage needs, you can buy a HUGE external drive.
A newer 7200rpm drive will be faster with sequential r/w because it has a higher density platter. However, that makes almost no difference on a laptop. The only place that has any effect is with video editing which is also the only place in this test we see a difference. As ehsad said above, replacing a 5400rpm drive should have shown a bigger difference. This really was a waste of an article because probably 98% of old laptops have a 5400rpm drive and that's what we wanted to see. This would have been much more useful to take an older 5400rpm drive and compare that not only to a brand new 7K500 drive, but also to an SSD like the Intel X25-M or maybe a Vertex. There are also quite a few 4200rpm laptop drives out there, would have liked to see that thrown in too.