Laptop Drives

[sechs]

I'm considering upgrading the Fujitsu standard 4200RPM drive in my Thinkpad, and wondering what the current thoughts were on good options.

 

[Tannin]

Some really boring thoughts from me, Sechs: essentially, I won't trust my data to any drive that doesn't have "Samsung" written on it. The Samsung advantage has been so clear for so long that I no longer even look at what the other companies make. It may well be that a competitor or two has now reached Samsung's level of excellence (though they were a very long way off it, a few years back) but I just wouldn't know any more. I only ever buy Samsung. They just work.

 

[sechs]

I'm not really in the loop as far as notebook drives are concerned, as I never deal with them in other than personal matters; and I'm just starting to do some research.

I personally lean towards Hitachi or Seagate, having had good experience with their other drive lines, but I haven't figured out how much faster I want to platters to spin....

 

[udaman]

I'm not really in the loop as far as notebook drives are concerned, as I never deal with them in other than personal matters; and I'm just starting to do some research.

I personally lean towards Hitachi or Seagate, having had good experience with their other drive lines, but I haven't figured out how much faster I want to platters to spin....

"I'm not really in the loop as far as notebook drives are concerned". Me either, but I just bought a Hitachi 5k120 60GB to replace an old and possibly one leg in the coffin, Toshiba 4.2k 10GB from *gasp* 2000. Trying to repair it this week...not fun, so I can do a normal clone to the new HD. New Hitachi is in a FW external enclosure, silent as a lamb (at least to my ears, faint, faint "hum" sound, can't hear the seeks with my ear against the FW case. Compare dying 4.2k Toshiba which is actually pretty noisy now, almost as load as a desktop ATA drive, lol.

I kind of doubt, but can't swear to it, that you'd notice the sound of a 7.2k Hitachi or Seagate. So I would go for the extra cost of one of those for a more noticeable speed boost as compared to a 5.4k drive. I considered a 80GB 5400.3 Seagate, but then after reading all the latest reader comments on this 160GB version at www.newegg.com, I thought twice about being an 'early' adopter of 1st gen perp. recording. 5-year warranty does have some worth, but not if the drives are more prone to failure (I've seen comment though, for PATA drives that have failed early on, so as always YMMV).

I'll wait until I get a new laptop next year, and hopefully that will ship with 2nd gen. perp. SATA drive, then I'll get a 2nd gen. 7.2k SATA (though I'm still not sure I'd want a perp. recording version, which is what Seagate is supposed to be shipping 1st Q 2007, and I would expect the 160GB to cost about the same as the 5.4k did when it 1st came out ~$320 this past February) drive to replace the original 5.4k. While I would guess you'll notice a speed boost when going from 4.2k to 5.4k, it probably won't be great.

Although, I hope by end of next year, SSD's will come down enough in price, so I can get a 64GB, and just backup to larger FW external HD.

WD is now shipping their perp. tech 160GB 5.4k drive if you want to avoid Hitachi or Seagate. Haven't read anything about newer Samsung drives, they tend to end up in the Korean market, long before I see them in the USA.

 

[sechs]

I want to avoid Western Digital. Actually, everyone should avoid Western Digital.

I haven't decided what kind of price and performance I want, although it's quite inexpensive for a bump from the current drive. Reasonable power and size increase are pretty easy to get, but I'm still considering noise and heat.

I looked a little into Samsung drives, but all the ones that I was able to find only had 1 year warranties. That's a nonstarter for something that *will* get dropped at some point.

 

[Santilli]

Sechs

I've been looking at em for a long time, since I bought a CF-51. I now think the 7K drivers are cheap enough to consider, using ATA 6. Might check, and see if your laptop will work with the new standard.

Appears from 2000 to about 2004 laptop 4k drive speed doubled,or a bit more. 10 mb data transfer vs. 24 mb/sec data transfer, that testing the same rpm drive in my CF-37 vs. the new one in the CF-51, IIRC. Don't see enough speed increase in the 5k's from the new generation 4k's to make the cost worth it. 7k's yes. I like Seagate, and warranties, for 5 years, so I think that just leaves the Seagate Momentus, 7k.

Samsung's drives get honorable mention, and, for an upgrade from an old 4k, they would be a pretty good speed jump.

Greg

 

[udaman]

I want to avoid Western Digital. Actually, everyone should avoid Western Digital.

I haven't decided what kind of price and performance I want, although it's quite inexpensive for a bump from the current drive. Reasonable power and size increase are pretty easy to get, but I'm still considering noise and heat.

I looked a little into Samsung drives, but all the ones that I was able to find only had 1 year warranties. That's a nonstarter for something that *will* get dropped at some point.

If you drop it, you should not expect the manufacturer to cover your arse with warranty. Sure you will drop it at some point, but then again at some point you will also die...life insurance, lol. Get a SSD if you beat the **** out of your laptop, drop it from more than 4 feet onto concrete.

Ok, WD is out, what about Fujitsu? They have a new perp. 5.4k 160GB (not sure if it's shipping yet). Higher capacity, latest, just shipping tech in laptop = $$$.

Hitachi beats Seagate (though you'd most likely never notice the small difference) for performance, and you can get a 7.2k in 60GB for less than $100 PATA. Silent PC has reviewed the E7K100,
http://www.silentpcreview.com/article297-page3.html

Compare to Samsung MP0402H




That's what I was considering, yet since I'm likely to upgrade to a C2D Merom or maybe wait for 45nm Intel chips Fall '07, I'm going to wait for 2nd gen SATA perp 7.2k drives and forego the extra $20 for a 7.2k drive, or maybe 64GB SSD (which of course will take major abuse like HD cannot, even the best new high G force models) when the price comes down.

Why worry about the warranty? It's always a crap shoot gamble with any drive. Seagate has 5-yr, but if you buy the perp. tech drives and they fail unexpectedly in a year or less, assuming you did not backup, you loose all of your data. Newegg customers aren't the only ones reporting perp drives failing.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/CustratingReview.asp?Item=N82E16822148073


But then the same can be said for more mature PATA longitudinal tech, even the Samsung....read through the 207 reviews @ newegg. yes, 'JoeB' says he's been replacing Toshiba drives, yet mine lasted almost 6yrs

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822152501

In reference to the Samsung from the link above:
"Cons: Lasted for a year and died recently...The drive used to have 3 year warranty, but now is only one year. Before it died, it began to run very slow and had clicking sound." LOL, that describes my 6yr old Toshiba, guess I like to live dangerously (or foolishly).

*update* did some verify/permissions repair via utility to the 5k120 and I could hear the seeks, though they were very faint, just barely above the sound of the "hum" of the spinning drive. Sure the 7.2k drives are likely to be louder, but not more so that my dying 4.2k Toshiba. $90 + shipping gets you a Hitachi 60GB 7.2k drive, can't go much wrong with that unless you want higher capacity in which case you could wait for the 7.2k 160GB Seagate next year, yes?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822145097

 

[Tannin]

I looked a little into Samsung drives, but all the ones that I was able to find only had 1 year warranties. That's a nonstarter for something that *will* get dropped at some point.

WTF?! They ship ex factory with a three year warranty. Every Samsung drive I have ever seen or heard of has shipped with a 3 year warranty. Samsung drive distribution in the States has pretty much sucked for a long time, sounds as if it still does. Sounds like someone is grey marketing to me. Definately dodgy. If those are the only Samsungs you can get, buy Hitachi or Seagate!

 

[sechs]

I agree, it's a bit dodgy. Just another reason not to buy. Since Samsung has never sold drives retail here (or anywhere, if I recall correctly), even from reputable sources, you have to be a bit careful.

How much more performance should I expect out of a 7200RPM drive over a 5400RPM drive? It isn't clear to me that it's worth the price.

 

[Platform]

Since Samsung has never sold drives retail here (or anywhere, if I recall correctly), even from reputable sources, you have to be a bit careful.

CompUSA has been selling Samsung hard drives in retail packaging for about a year and a half or so.

It's a *lot* easier to find retail Samsung optical drives.

 

[udaman]

I agree, it's a bit dodgy. Just another reason not to buy. Since Samsung has never sold drives retail here (or anywhere, if I recall correctly), even from reputable sources, you have to be a bit careful.

How much more performance should I expect out of a 7200RPM drive over a 5400RPM drive? It isn't clear to me that it's worth the price.

That was fun (took 14+hrs to get the slowly dying Toshiba to clone to the new drive partition ;-) ).

Samsung's USA site is not very helpful, only the MP0804H model is searchable and shown to have just a 12 month warranty. Yet zipzoomfly.com lists the same (all of them actually) model as having a 3 yr warranty. Link to CompUSA for retail boxed drives as stated by Platform:

http://www.compusa.com/products/pro...92&Ne=400000&Cn=Computer_Upgrades_Hard_Drives

Note in small print in this CompUSA image of presumably the retail box cover, "3-year warranty"

Working in a very quiet room at the moment, on a 2in thick, 1.8Ghz, G5 iMac. Seeks with the 7200.7 [SIZE=-1]ST380013AS SATA drive are just barely noticeable with your ears up to the case, over the sound of the quiet fan. The dying Toshiba laptop drive is louder, but still relatively quiet to my ears, compared to older 5.4k & 7.2k desktop drives of the late 1990's.

Some people are very sensitive to seek sounds, so maybe a 7.2k laptop drive is not worth the small amount of extra noise.

No one can tell you with authority that an extra $40 btw. a Hitachi 5k120 100GB drive and the same size 7k100 is worth it, performance wise. That's highly subjective. But a 7.2k laptop drive will be most likely be only slightly slower than a desktop drive, unless you are fanatical about drives like Eugene- then only a Raptor will do as a boot drive. A 5.4k drive will be relatively that much slower than a 7.2k desktop.

Coming from an older 4.2k laptop, going to a 7.2k will bring the more dramatic increase in performance. Best way to tell, spend the 15% restocking fee & return shipping costs- order both from newegg or zipzoomfly. Use the 7.2k drive for a week, then switch to the 5.4k for another. If you can "perceive" a noticeable difference, then only you can decide if it's worth $40 extra for the 100GB size. If I was not planning to upgrade to a new laptop w/SATA drive next year, I would not have hesistated for a second, bought the 60GB 7.2k drive for the extra money. Hard drives are the slowest part of a system, if they made a laptop 10k rpm drive version of the Seagate server 2.5in drives, I'd buy one if the cost penalty was not too great. I'll be happy when this is all a moot question, as soon as SSD drives hit economy of scale and replace HDD for a majority of laptop uses...soon?

Not sure you'd get any more informative answers, but you can always trying posting the question on silentpcreview forums (jtr1962 helped them with their design of measuring equipment for power consumption/dissipation, much as he did for SR; it is interesting the differing power consumption figures each site has generated for the same drives):

http://forums.silentpcreview.com/viewtopic.php?t=28839
[/SIZE]

 

[udaman]

*update* & rant
I hate hard drives! The new 5k120 60GB is only a week old, still in the FW case, and it's developed an old 'dull' clicking sound I guess when the heads park after read/write operations (blinking of the FW case blue LED). Since it did not make this sound for a week's worth of use (light duty, nothing disk intensive I can think of, mostly web-surfing, haven't even started using Photoshop), I'm guessing I've got a bad drive that will fail sometime down the road. Or just unlucky to get one that is abnormally loud?

I recall reading about noisy WD & I think early Seagate 2.5in laptop drives, there was a firmware fix for those (mentioned a few times on SR forums), but I don't remember this being a problem with Hitachi, certainly not a newer gen of longitudinal tech drives. This noise is annoying, it's louder than the dying/worn-out Toshiba, which has a whining metallic whooshing sound from the spindle noise (not fluid bearings). Not as sharp as the sound of SCSI drive seeks, or older ATA drives, but disconcerting never the less.

I know SSD drives can unexpectedly catastrophically fail without any warning, but the day SSD's become affordable enough for me, I'm replacing my laptop HDD, and sticking that into an external FW for backup only.

Very frustrating. Since I bought it from Mac supplier OtherWorldComputing, I'm going to do a Advance Cross-Ship Replacement RMA, do another clone from defective 5k120 to the new replacement.

I may just go ahead and buy a 7k100 and use the new 5k120 as a backup in the FW case. Sure wish I had a new laptop though, and reliable DVD-burner, mine died a few months ago (waiting for shipping Blu-Ray drives to appear in a laptop before replacing my old system). If I get a 7k100 it will be a 2 platter design (the 60GB 5k120 is single platter), and post any impressions of speed/noise differences btw the 2.

Completely SSD everything, can't wait for the day the economy of scale makes these possible to relegate moving-parts drives to the trash heep. Every kind of drive that has moving parts, will invariably suffer from those aspects at one time or another...and I'm a lucky bastard .

 

[udaman]

I'm on my 2nd Hitachi 5k120 drive which was manufactured in Thailand like the 1st, just one month apart. It's clicking just like the 1st one. Really sucks, probably same problem WD's or older Seagate or was it Hitachi's were having in earlier gen. drives (last year, I forget when I read about it on SR & some other sites).

Did I mention I hate hard drives?

Going to replace this Hitachi with a Seagate and see if the clicking (parking of the heads, power saving feature or something stupid thing they don't have on desktop drives) is not present on those. Maybe I'll get the 80GB PMR Seagate and live dangerously with the possibility that may be prone to failure with infant technology.

BTW, the 5.4k drive is faster in general use compared to teh 5 yr old 4.2k drive it replaces, but not substantially faster from my point of view. And considering the old 4.2k is dying from bearing wear, at near full capacity, you'd think it would be MUCH slower than a modern 5.4k drive.

 

[Santilli]

udamen: Kind of depends. Some of the old 4k's were 10 mbs.
New ones are about 22 mbs. That should make a difference, but, on an older system, maybe there is another bottleneck?
Apple used to use ATA chips in the beige computers that ran at half the ATA standard of 33mbs at the time. Cost savings, and, most ATA drives at the time where slower then 16mb/sec.
They also used a pci chipset, grackle, that wouldn't go over 73 mb/sec, on an industry standard 133mb/sec.

Perhaps your laptop has such a chipset?
How about downloading some sort of disk testing software, and run it on your drives, to establish bench marks?

Greg

 

[udaman]

udamen: Kind of depends. Some of the old 4k's were 10 mbs.
New ones are about 22 mbs. That should make a difference, but, on an older system, maybe there is another bottleneck?
Apple used to use ATA chips in the beige computers that ran at half the ATA standard of 33mbs at the time. Cost savings, and, most ATA drives at the time where slower then 16mb/sec.
They also used a pci chipset, grackle, that wouldn't go over 73 mb/sec, on an industry standard 133mb/sec.

Perhaps your laptop has such a chipset?
How about downloading some sort of disk testing software, and run it on your drives, to establish bench marks?

Greg

It sure does kind of depend. Depends on what benchmarks you are using. Depends on how 'sensitive' you are to these things, what type of use your system is regularly subjected to. If you use PS, and you're hitting the HD virtual mem. cache, yep any improvement in drive performance is going to be noticed. But PS is also, CPU & GPU intensive, and if you've got an older system, that's also a 'bottleneck'.

Doing a file search, I can easily see an improvement, significant in how fast the search is completed when you have say, several hundred 'hits' for the search term. My old Toshiba was/is failing however and the disk was near 90% full, that would also impact performance as much as the difference btw a older 10% full 4.2k & 10% newer full 5.4k. Notice in this older test of a Hitachi 80GB (benefit of higher density platters, of which this current Hitachi 60GB I had now is higher still) 4.2k drive on sequential read/writes is nearly as fast as 5.4k or 1st gen 7.2k drives, but slower on other tests. Everyone says 4.2k drives are dogs, in everyday use, but I suppose it depends on how sensitive you are to those changes, and how modern a laptop you're putting one of these newer drives into. I think sechs' laptop is probably going to fare about the same as mine as far as perceived 'improvement', a little better with a 5.4k, more noticeable difference with a 7.2k, but not as much as a slower 4.2k drive as last used on laptops of a year or two ago, going to a new 7.2k drive.

http://www.barefeats.com/fire39.html

Notice that the Pismo (my sys) a reader tested, came up under performing newer laptop, even though the ATA bus in both is 100 or greater (far above the theoretical performance of all but the newest/last gen of desktop PATA drives).

What really, really annoys me now, is that after I've done a fair amount of searching; is that nearly all laptop drive manufacturers in an attempt to satisfy the client (laptop manufacturers), have in recent years implemented a new enhanced reliability 'feature' of unloading the heads-so there is less likely damage when the laptop is dropped, as well as constantly unloading the heads for power saving....arrrgh! That is the noise I'm hearing in a quiet environment, and it's irritating, as someone described it 'like water dripping from a leaky faucet'. You can in Windows environment use a program called Notebook Hardware Control, to try and set that power saving mode on various drives, to 'maximum performance' to try and get the APM (automatic power management) to not unload the heads as often, reducing the constant 'clicking' sound; but some with Hitachi drives have been unsuccessful in achieving a quiet system.

I'm thinking of getting the Hitachi blade server model, E7k100, as I think that model does not incorporate the APM mode typical for laptop drives of today. Samsung is supposed to have a quieter mechanism for loading/unloading the heads, but I just looked at newegg.com and there are a number of reader reports of those drives that just belly up and fail. Yeah, I should have a 2nd drive w/backup on it, but I'm trying to upgrade to a DVD burner for that purpose, only I can't seem to find a newer drive, Panasonic or Pioneer, slave/master; that will be recognized by Apple System Profiler (the old LG DVD drive is still recognized , even though it no longer will play a CD/DVD, needs replacing)

So, it's seems right now, because I can't stand that infernal clicking sound of the heads parking to save battery power (even when I'm running off of A/C power), I'm going to be limited to one of 2 possible drives, the 24/7 E series of Hitachi's 7.2k line, or one of the Samsung 5.4k drives. This report on silentpcreview details the lack of APM on the E7k100. Since I can get a substaintally higher capacity battery than originally shipped with my system, I sure don't need such annoying firmware 'power saving' features such as APM!

http://www.silentpcreview.com/article297-page2.html

 

[Sol]

Thought I'd revive this thread for a bit since I'm looking at getting a new hard drive for my laptop. I'm finding the 5400K rpm Hitachi that came in the machine to be mind bogglingly slow for sustained transfers (like loading in games or installing applications) and I'd like to grab a 7200rpm drive to replace it (Well like others here I'd really like a 10k rpm drive to replace it, but fat chance, so 7200 will do).

My choices seem to be a Seagate or a Hitachi drive, I've basically decided to go with 100GB since my 80 is constantly running out of space, so now I just need to figure out what brand to go with. Generally I take a page from Tannins book here and just go Samsung but sans that option what would people suggest?

In contrast to my expectation the Hitachi drives are actually a little bit cheaper than the Seagates.

 

[Mercutio]

The 100GB 7200rpm SATA drive in the Thinkpad T60p that I'm working on right now is a Hitachi, apparently. I do not notice any drive noise from it at all, and I'm doing a doing a fairly disk-intensive partition resize (on a partition with data!) at the moment.

Speed is... better than I can remember ever seeing on a laptop. That might be the E7600 or the 4GB of RAM, though.

 

[Mercutio]

Actually I take that back. I can hear a little clicky noise when the drive is being written to. It's not noticeable from four feet away, though. The fluorescent lights in my office are making more noise than anything else at the moment.

 

[Sol]

So based on the posts here I'd be fairly well served by either drive. I guess it will come down to price and availability.