Which Notebook Hard Drive should I get?

[chikorita157]

Currently, I have a Hitachi Travelstar HTS543225L9SA02 (5400 RPM, SATA II 3.0 GB/s, 250GB Hard Drive) which came with the computer (Unibody Macbook Pro, 2.4 GHz model) and planing to upgrade to a bigger and faster hard drive in a few months since 250 GB is a bit small and I can't set aside more space to store computer games on my Windows Vista Bootcamp partition and it's a little bit slow (Vista reports the hard drive transfer rate rating as 5.3). I am planning to get the drive from Newegg, but I don't know which one will provide the best performance.

I upgraded my old Macbook Pro (late 2006) with the HITACHI Travelstar 7K320 (320 GB model) and installed it but I have read on the internet that it's not the fastest 7200 RPM HD out there and heard that Western Digital Scorpio Black is faster than the hard drive I put in... Several questions:

Which drive would be the fastest in real world? I do some gaming in Windows and want to know which one will load the OS and game files faster. Note that my Unibody Macbook Pro supports SATA II (3.0 Gb/s) provided by the MCP79 chipset.

Is there any performance difference (beside energy usage) if I were to use a 5400 RPM over a 7200 RPM? I noticed that my 7200 RPM hard drive on my older Macbook Pro booted Mac OS X and Vista faster than the stock 5400 RPM 120GB HD it came with.

Don't suggest me SSD drives... they are way too expensive and don't have much capacity.

[Claies]

Oh yes, because RPM means revolutions per minute. It means the disk platters spin faster, so the drive can read and write data faster. It's one of the most visible ways to tell performance. Another thing to note is how much cache it has. It's usually something like 8, 16, or 32MB. Naturally, the larger that is, the better.

[chikorita157]

Yes, I know 7200 RPM operates faster, but what made me more confused is that I looked up the Western Digital Scorpio Blue WD5000BEVT which I looked up some benchmarks and it comes very close to 7200 RPM performance in terms of transfer rate dispite the Scorpio Blue only have 8 MB cache and 5400 RPM and the performance is close to the Scorpio Black, but slightly slower in some tests. (Source of where I got the test infomation)

There is a 7200 RPM 500 GB HD, the Seagate Momentus 7200.4 ST9500420AS, but it cost alot more and I don't really trust Seagate that much because of their firmware fiasco that caused massive data loss.

What drive do any of you suggest:
Western Digital Scorpio Blue WD5000BEVT (500GB, 5400 RPM, 8 MB cache) - (Although it's nice to have extra space, but I have several external HD already which uses Firewire 400 and USB)
Hitachi Travelstar 7K320 (320 GB, 7200 RPM, 16 MB cache)
Western Digital Scorpio Black WD3200BEKT (320 GB, 7200 RPM, 16 MB cache)
Fujitsu MHZ2320BJ-G2 (320 GB, 7200 RPM, 16 MB cache)

[Neat Hedgehog]

Although the Scorpio Blue has the extra room, I wouldn't pick it because it only has an 8 MB cache. Aside from the drive RPMs, the cache is going to make the most difference in real-world applications. It's lower RPM is also going to make it noticeably slower than it's 7200 RPM competition at reading/writing large quantities of small files at once, since it is physically incapable of spinning the platters as fast to read/write data from multiple locations.

Personally, I wouldn't trust Seagate either. Their drive quality still seems low compared to other brands, and I've had a few that developed severe problems and data loss.

Out of the four you listed, I would suggest the Western Digital Scorpio Black, or the Hitachi. I honestly wouldn't expect to see a ton of performance difference between the two of them, unless you were running them in a file server or something, since they have similar specs and generally perform very similarly in benchmarks. Just about the only reason I have for suggesting the WD drive over the other is that I have never had a WD drive break down on me, whereas I've owned Hitachi and Fujitsu drives that have died.

[Journeyman]

Western Digital Scorpio Black WD3200BEKT seems to be your best option at the moment. Higher RPM and twice as much cache size...why not take best of both worlds?

I cannot say anything bad about recent Hitachi desktop models, but I would not recommend a Hitachi HDD for a laptop. The ones I've seen start a-clicking away under high loads.
If you ever had a hard drive fail on you, that clicking alone can drive you mad. It can be fixed by changing a few settings - but you will have sacrifice some performance.

I will advise against Fujitsu HDDs *glares at 4 failed Fujitsu drives in the garage* They are amazingly good at surviving damage and giving you just enough time to transfer all the data. But we don't want to be in an emergency in the first place

[chikorita157]

I guess I'll get the Western Digital Scorpio Black and it costs $80 dollars on Newegg (I check other places but they sell it at a higher price for some reason... What I did notice with my stock drive is that when there is any real movement, there is a loud click which I'm somewhat concerned about, but since my Macbook Pro already have a freefall sensor, I don't really need any special drive that have a freefall sensor built in.

I do have a 120GB Fujitsu Apple Stock HD I put in a USB enclosure and it still works even after accidently dropped it... and still comes out with no bad sectors although I wasn't reading data from it, but it lost contact with the SATA connector since the enclosure is a cheap one... but most of my External HDs I own are Western Digital and have not encountered any failure, but I did encountered a hard drive failure with a Toshiba drive... I can't trust Toshiba for any drives they make because of it.

Update: After some second thoughts... I found out that the WD3200BEVT use more power than the WD5000BEVT which uses 2 W than the former which uses 4.2 W, alot more than the 7k320 I have on my older Macbook Pro which only uses 3.1 W. I'm saying this because battery life is important since I also use my Unibody Macbook Pro as my main laptop that I take back and forth to college, so I might get the WD5000BEVT which is 9 dollars more since it's similar to the performance of the WD3200BEVT dispute having 8mb less cache and slower speed after looking at several benchmarks and it doesn't use nearly as much power as the former, but it still be a improvement over the stock drive since the transfer rates are slightly higher since my stock drive can only read at 47.2 mb/s while the WD5000BEVT reads at 61.4 mb/s.

[chikorita157]

I finally bought the Western Digital Scorpio Blue 500GB 5400 RPM 2.5 HD after doing some more research and looking around since the WD 320 Scorpio Black uses too much power which can take away battery life and the 500GB one will perform closely to the Scorpio Black since the higher data density, causing it to give faster hard drive transfer rates at the same time with better battery life. It cost $96.25 at Newegg (after tax, $10 dollars off and with free shipping)... I'll compare the results with my Hitachi after I install the drive into my Unibody Macbook Pro and clone the partitions.

But yeah... I won't be able to do the hard drive upgrade since the screw that keeps the Hard Drive retainer is screwed on tightly in the factory and can't make it budge, even using the right screwdriver... so I need to make a trip to a Apple store which will leave me without a computer for one day (but I have a backup laptop to use when that happens.)

[chikorita157]

I have recieved the drive on Friday of last week and installed it into my uMBP. Boot times were alot better and close to my Hitachi 320 GB HD and got a WEI rating of 5.6 which is close to my 320 GB hd on my other computer which got a 5.7

HD Tune results:

Hitachi 250 GB 5400 rpm (Apple Stock HD)


Western Digital Scorpio Blue 500GB 5400 RPM HD


Hitachi 320 GB 7200 RPM HD:


Overall, the performance of the Scorpio Blue 500 GB is actually close to the performance of the 7200 RPM HD, dispute being 5400 rpm and having only 8mb of cache... The drive is quiet compared to the Hitachi 320 GB 7200RPM HD which is loud under load. I recommend this drive to people who want 7200 RPM performance and big space without the extra noise and power consumption (and besides, the Seagate 500GB 2.5inch 7200 RPM HD performed badly in real world tests and is alot more expensive than the WD Scorpio Blue drive)

[Ledgem]

Unless your primary data load is huge, what's the point of upgrading the internal hard drive? A 7200 RPM drive will consume more power and generate more heat than a 5400 RPM drive. Even if minimal, when your battery life really matters to you, that counts.

I have a load of Firewire 400 external drives, but for virtualization and occasional games I wanted something across a faster link. Instead of upgrading my internal HD, I just bought an eSATA Expresscard (probably cost around $30-40, can't remember). Enclosures that support eSATA are even more common and cheaper than those that support Firewire, although in many cases you can find ones that support USB, Firewire, and eSATA. Using a drive over eSATA is essentially the same as having it as an internal drive, as far as transfer speeds go. The benefit, of course, is that the drive is external - you're not gutted on the price of buying a large-capacity 2.5" drive and can just get a 3.5" drive instead.

Personally, the only time I'll be upgrading my internal (200 GB 5400 RPM) is when a 200 GB or larger SSD goes below $100. The speed boost would be quite nice. For capacity, I'll always go external.

Either way, that's just my opinion - I'm glad to hear that your purchase is working well for you. Thanks for keeping us updated on how things turned out.

[chikorita157]

Actually, the drive didn't impact the battery life and I was able to get close to 5 hours of battery life with low brightness settings on my Macbook Pro which isn't typical with most PC laptops and it runs very quiet... but although those SSD drives are fast, they are relatively new technology which haven't matured yet and they have a high failure rate because of it... so I don't really want to blow $500 dollars for a 256GB SSD and have it break on me.

I'm not likely getting an enclosure for the drive since I need to place it back when I have to send my computer for repair since Apple doesn't provide any warranty for user-installed third party drives.

[Ledgem]

Originally Posted by chikorita157

Actually, the drive didn't impact the battery life

While an older 5400 RPM drive from many years ago might take more energy than a newer 7200 RPM drive, a new 5400 RPM drive is going to take less energy than a 7200 RPM drive. The difference to battery life probably isn't going to be in hours, but in minutes. However, there'll be a difference. How much of a difference does it make? I don't really know - if it's only five minutes, then it really doesn't matter. If it's 30 minutes, then people might care.

Solid state drives aren't really that new. How long have Compact Flash cards been around, or flash memory in general? SSDs are a similar concept, just scaled up and with a more complex controller. I haven't seen any statistics on it, but I'd be surprised if they do have a higher failure rate than magnetic drives. I'd think that it's just because SSDs are newer that it's a big deal every time on fails. By comparison, nobody really makes a fuss when a magnetic drive fails, because it's the norm.

But that's just banter from me. The main thing I really wanted to say was that your computer may not have come with eSATA ports, but you have that Expresscard slot. You can convert that into many things, including eSATA ports. Expresscards act like PCI cards on desktops, it's a direct bridge to the motherboard. Thus you can still get some high bandwidth transfers running through there. So if you ever crave a larger HD for gaming (or other potentially hard drive access-intensive purposes) where Firewire isn't giving you a fast enough performance, consider getting an eSATA expresscard, get an enclosure that supports eSATA, and go with a big, cheap, 7200 RPM 3.5" drive.

Unless an external drive really doesn't suit your needs, it's the more economical choice. 500 GB 2.5" drives recently dropped below $100, I believe, yet 1 TB 3.5" drives are now below $100 quite easily. Unless you really need that space to be with you at all times, it makes more sense to go with the external. If your reason to get an internal drive is for the transfer speed advantage over something like Firewire or USB, then eSATA abolishes that, as an external drive connected through eSATA is almost as quick (or if you believe the specifications, exactly as quick) as if it were an internal drive. (It's also nice to be able to put that Expresscard slot to use.)

[chikorita157]

The latest update to the Macbook Pro lines no longer have Expresscard slot unless you get the 17 inch model, or you will be stuck with Firewire and USB, but typically, hard drives rarely go any higher than 80 MB/s, so you won't hardly know the difference with Firewire 800, while USB and FW 400 is slower.