7200RPM Laptop Drives. Hitachi vs. Seagate

[Compman55]

Ok, Back in 06-07 hitachi ruled as being the all time fastest and most releiabe. How about now? How do the 500 GB models compare to each other? I am interested in opinions of both performance and reliability.

 

[Texun]

I can't speak to your specific question but my Dell came with a 7200 RPM Hitachi, although it was only an 80 gig. I swapped it for a WD Black 7200 RPM 160g and the speed increase was very noticeable. I haven't compared benchmarks but the difference is enough to see and feel. Just FYI. 🙂

 

[Compman55]

Well, hitachi and seagate are the only two companies that make a 500GB 7200RPM drive. I would not mind trying a WD but they only goto 320.

 

[alexruiz]

The travelstar 7K500 (Hitachi 500GB 7200rpm) is the fastest mechanical hard drive for a laptop.

 

[razel]

Storagereview has a head to head review of the drives you mentioned. There is an extensive tread notebookreview for the two drives you mentioned as well. Benched performance is roughly the same. In real life, you'll even be happy with the WD Blue 5400. Someone in notebookreview compared the three and stayed with the WD Blue.

I also had a 7200 Hitachi PATA in 2006. Replaced it with one of the fastest Samsung 5400 with a 160GB density per platter and it was faster in all benches except access time. It was also nearly silent and faster in real life usage. Only thing the 7200 was faster at was with extensive random read operations like windows updates and virus scans.

Reliability is unkown since the drives are new, but Seagate and Hitachi have been in the industry forever. I guess you'll have to concern yourself with the warranty.

But, if you're looking for ultimate performance, then you already know the answer to that one. 🙂

 

[jjmIII]

But, if you're looking for ultimate performance, then you already know the answer to that one.

I'd go 320 Black (or SSD 🙂 ) and use an external 2.5 backup hdd.

 

[alexruiz]

I'd go 320 Black (or SSD 🙂 ) and use an external 2.5 backup hdd.

The 7K500 is faster than the Scorpio black. Fast enough to be noticeable.

 

[aggressor]

Are 7200rpm IDE drives more or less phased out now? I need to replace a laptop hard drive that is about 6 years old and incredibly slow, but it has an IDE interface 🙁

 

[razel]

For IDE yes. You're left with years old 7200 drives. But it's not all bad news. The Samsung 160GB 5400 and Western Digital Blue 320 GB 5400 are faster than the 7200 of years old. IDE SSDs are also still available and in production. There's a Transcend 32GB (Jmicron, probably the fixed version) for about $125 on newegg and a RunCore (Indilliux based) for much more.